Success Quote by Walter Legge

Legge’s line lands like a velvet-gloved slap at the fantasy that “more voices” automatically means better culture. Coming from a record-industry power broker who helped shape the classical canon on disc, it’s less a philosopher’s lament than a practitioner’s warning: art, in his view, needs gatekeepers, patrons, and uncompromising standards, not the churn of popular preference.

The provocation hinges on the word “fatal.” He’s not arguing democracy merely distracts the arts; he’s claiming it kills their conditions of excellence. The subtext is managerial and economic: when taste is organized by mass demand, institutions stop taking risks, stop funding the difficult, and start optimizing for scale. “Chaos” is what happens when no authority can credibly arbitrate quality; the “new and lower common denominators” are what happens when authority is replaced by market metrics. It’s a bleak diagnosis of cultural selection: not the best wins, but the most broadly consumable.

Context matters. Legge’s career sits inside the 20th century’s shift from elite patronage and repertory culture to mass media, radio, recordings, and later television. Those technologies democratized access while also standardizing consumption. His statement betrays both genuine anxiety about dilution and a self-interested defense of curatorial control. It also reveals a particular definition of “the arts”: art as refinement, hierarchy, difficulty. Democracy threatens that not because people are incapable of taste, but because democratic systems tend to reward consensus, and consensus is rarely where the avant-garde, the idiosyncratic, or the rigorously demanding survives.