Politics & Power Quote by Beatrice Wood

A faint shrug disguised as a diagnosis, Beatrice Wood's line needles a culture that wants the glamour of art without the inconvenience of it. "But, you see" is doing quiet work: it’s conversational, even polite, the kind of phrase you use when you're about to deliver something slightly damning while keeping your hands clean. Then comes the real incision: in America, theatre is "not always art". Not "rarely", not "never" - the wording leaves room for exceptions, which makes the critique feel fair-minded even as it lands.

Wood knew the difference between art as risk and theatre as product. Coming up through the Dada-adjacent, anti-bourgeois energies of the early 20th century, she watched performance become increasingly entangled with commerce, celebrity, and the need to please. The subtext is less snobbery than suspicion: theatre can be a space of experimentation, but it can also be an industry built to flatter audience expectations and investor spreadsheets. When theatre is treated as entertainment first, it becomes legible, safe, repeatable - all the things modern American culture tends to reward.

There’s also a gendered undertone. Wood, a woman artist moving through male-dominated art worlds, understood how "theatre" can imply performance-as-social-survival: personas, charm, the curated self. Her remark reads like a warning about a country where showmanship can replace substance, and where the stage - literal or metaphorical - is too often mistaken for the studio.