"Anyone who creates something new or does something different artistically is going to be singled out"
About this Quote
Innovation rarely arrives as a ribbon-cutting; it arrives as a target. Carlisle Floyd’s line has the plainspoken realism of a working composer who watched American classical music police its borders for decades. “Singled out” is doing a lot of work here: it doesn’t promise applause or condemnation, just attention that isolates. The phrasing sidesteps the romance of the lone genius and lands on the social fact that art is a group project with gatekeepers. If you deviate, the group notices.
The intent is half warning, half reassurance. Floyd isn’t arguing that newness is inherently good; he’s describing the predictable reaction to difference as an occupational hazard. There’s a subtle solidarity in the “anyone” - a democratizing move that places the avant-garde composer, the regional opera maker, the genre-crosser in the same pressure cooker. His own career supplies the context: Floyd built operas that sounded unmistakably American, folded in vernacular speech and Southern settings, and refused the imported European prestige script that long dominated the operatic imagination. That kind of choice doesn’t just get reviewed; it gets categorized, and categorization is a polite form of control.
The subtext is about institutions as much as audiences. New work threatens the economy of taste: the critics’ vocabulary, the funders’ risk tolerance, the performers’ training, the repertory’s inertia. To be “singled out” is to be made legible in someone else’s terms - genius, gimmick, provincial, radical - before the work is allowed to be simply itself. Floyd’s sentence doesn’t flatter rebellion; it names the cost of making art that won’t blend into the wallpaper.
The intent is half warning, half reassurance. Floyd isn’t arguing that newness is inherently good; he’s describing the predictable reaction to difference as an occupational hazard. There’s a subtle solidarity in the “anyone” - a democratizing move that places the avant-garde composer, the regional opera maker, the genre-crosser in the same pressure cooker. His own career supplies the context: Floyd built operas that sounded unmistakably American, folded in vernacular speech and Southern settings, and refused the imported European prestige script that long dominated the operatic imagination. That kind of choice doesn’t just get reviewed; it gets categorized, and categorization is a polite form of control.
The subtext is about institutions as much as audiences. New work threatens the economy of taste: the critics’ vocabulary, the funders’ risk tolerance, the performers’ training, the repertory’s inertia. To be “singled out” is to be made legible in someone else’s terms - genius, gimmick, provincial, radical - before the work is allowed to be simply itself. Floyd’s sentence doesn’t flatter rebellion; it names the cost of making art that won’t blend into the wallpaper.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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