Love Quote by John Guare

Guare’s line isn’t an idle complaint about tasteless collectors; it’s a playwright’s jab at a culture that can’t justify attention unless it can put a price tag on it. The opening question - “Does any art have a practical value?” - is bait. “Practical” is the language of budgets, grant panels, school boards, and dinner-party defensiveness. Guare knows that once you accept that frame, art is already losing. It’s being forced to argue on the terrain of utility, measurable outcomes, resale value.

Then he pivots to the uglier, funnier truth: we do talk about paintings “practically,” but only in the most cynical sense. The “expensive painting” becomes a conversational cheat code. If you don’t know how to look, you can still have a take: it cost millions. That number stands in for experience, taste, history, even feeling. Price becomes a substitute for language - and, by extension, for perception.

The subtext is theater-sharp: Guare is diagnosing a failure of criticism and of public confidence. When a society loses the habit of describing what art does to the mind and body, it reaches for quantifiable proxies. His “this century” lands as an indictment of modernity’s market logic, where cultural prestige is increasingly validated by auctions, headlines, and bragging rights rather than intimacy with the work. It’s funny because it’s true, and bleak because it’s a warning: if money is our only vocabulary for art, we’re not just commodifying paintings - we’re shrinking our capacity to see.