Art & Creativity Quote by Michael Tilson Thomas

Tilson Thomas is poking at a familiar hypocrisy in cultured life: the part where people want the thrill-signaling of the new, as long as it stays safely visual, hangable, and instantly legible. Contemporary art collecting has become a kind of social fluency test. You can buy the right canvas, place it in the right room, and let its difficulty read as sophistication. But the musical equivalent can not be reduced to decor or asset class. New music occupies time, demands attention, and risks discomfort in public. You cannot walk past it at a cocktail party and pretend you have absorbed it.

The “conundrum” he names is really a status glitch. A collector can champion a painter who breaks form, because the market has built a ladder of validation: galleries, fairs, critics, resale. Contemporary classical music often arrives without that cushioning infrastructure, and it also carries the baggage of an audience trained to treat the canon as a museum of greatest hits. So the same patrons who pride themselves on daring taste in the visual realm can become conservative, even resentful, the moment a concert program suggests they might not get their expected emotional return.

His phrasing is diplomatic but pointed: “not interested, or perhaps even hostile” lands like a raised eyebrow at the idea that resistance is not neutral preference, but a kind of cultural policing. Subtext: if you can tolerate provocation on the wall, you can tolerate it in the air. The real obstacle is less aesthetics than habit, and the fear of being caught not understanding in real time.