Parenting & Family Quote by John Updike

Updike’s jab lands because it flatters and indicts the art world in the same breath: we love art most when it’s alive, pliable, a little scuffed by use. “Baby shoes” evoke tenderness, intimacy, and rapid change - objects made for a brief, necessary job, not eternity. Coat them in gold and you get a shrine: beautiful, expensive, and pointless at the one thing they were built to do. The metaphor is deliberately domestic, almost embarrassingly small, which is Updike’s way of puncturing grandiose talk about Art with a capital A.

The intent is anti-mummification. Updike is warning against the moment craft becomes commodity and experience becomes collectible. Gold is not just money; it’s prestige, institutional validation, the museum vitrine, the auction catalog, the critical consensus that freezes a work into “important.” That coating preserves, but it also suffocates. Once art is treated primarily as an asset or a status object, it stops being a tool for living - something you handle, argue with, reread, lend, misuse, even outgrow.

There’s also a sly rebuke to the artist’s own temptations. Writers, especially successful ones, can feel their work harden into brand: the polished sentences, the safe themes, the self-conscious “literary” sheen applied to satisfy gatekeepers. Updike, often tagged as a stylist, hints at the risk of over-finishing: the prose so lacquered it resists touch. The subtext is almost moral: if art can’t be worn, it can’t walk with us.