"Art indeed is a term referring to the social source and to the social utility of creative acts"
About this Quote
Riding yanks "art" off its velvet pedestal and drags it into the street where people actually live. By calling art a "term" that refers to a "social source" and "social utility", she’s not defining beauty; she’s policing language. The maneuver is strategic: if art is primarily a label we apply to creative acts, then the label can be interrogated, revoked, or exposed as ideological cover. Riding, a poet famously skeptical of literary institutions and the romance of the artist-genius, tightens the screws on the idea that creation is private, mystical, or self-justifying.
The phrasing is pointedly clinical. "Social source" undercuts the fantasy of the solitary creator, reminding us that every lyric impulse is built from shared materials: idiom, genre, education, class expectations, even the permissions a culture grants certain voices. "Social utility" is sharper. It implies that art is not merely enjoyed but used: to confer status, to enforce taste hierarchies, to launder power into "culture", to serve as a moral alibi, to produce community, to soothe, to provoke. Riding doesn’t specify which utilities are legitimate; she makes the reader do the uncomfortable work of naming them.
Context matters: a modernist era obsessed with formal innovation and aesthetic autonomy, plus Riding’s own turn toward truth-telling and suspicion of poetic glamour. The subtext is a warning: if you insist art is above society, you’re likely protecting some social arrangement you’d rather not admit.
The phrasing is pointedly clinical. "Social source" undercuts the fantasy of the solitary creator, reminding us that every lyric impulse is built from shared materials: idiom, genre, education, class expectations, even the permissions a culture grants certain voices. "Social utility" is sharper. It implies that art is not merely enjoyed but used: to confer status, to enforce taste hierarchies, to launder power into "culture", to serve as a moral alibi, to produce community, to soothe, to provoke. Riding doesn’t specify which utilities are legitimate; she makes the reader do the uncomfortable work of naming them.
Context matters: a modernist era obsessed with formal innovation and aesthetic autonomy, plus Riding’s own turn toward truth-telling and suspicion of poetic glamour. The subtext is a warning: if you insist art is above society, you’re likely protecting some social arrangement you’d rather not admit.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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