Life & Wisdom Quote by Nikki Giovanni

Giovanni flips a familiar bit of cultural gatekeeping with the clean efficiency of a poet who’s spent a career being told where she does and doesn’t belong. “Art is not for the cultivated taste” rejects the idea that art exists to flatter people who already have the right references, the right schooling, the right dinner-party vocabulary. That opening clause is a jab at the museum-audio-guide mentality: art as a reward for refinement, a velvet rope disguised as “standards.”

Then she turns the sentence on its hinge: “It is to cultivate taste.” The point isn’t that taste is meaningless; it’s that taste is made. Art’s job, in Giovanni’s framing, is active and democratic: it trains perception, expands appetite, builds a palate where there wasn’t one. The subtext is political without needing to announce itself. If taste can be cultivated, then it can be shared, taught, argued over. It stops being a credential and becomes a practice.

Context matters here. Giovanni emerges from the Black Arts Movement and the larger postwar fight over whose stories count as “literature.” Her line refuses the assimilationist bargain where marginalized artists are expected to meet pre-approved notions of sophistication. Instead, she asserts that art changes the audience, not the other way around. It’s also a warning to artists: don’t confuse exclusion with excellence. If your work only plays to the already-initiated, it may be serving status more than imagination.