Success Quote by David Rockefeller

“Eventually” does a lot of quiet work here. Rockefeller isn’t celebrating a lightning-bolt cultural revolution; he’s narrating legitimacy arriving on a delay, like a dividend. The line frames the Museum of Modern Art not as an audacious wager by elites, but as a practical solution to a civic problem that, in hindsight, everyone agrees needed solving. That’s the rhetorical magic: it retrofits consensus onto what was once controversial.

MoMA’s founding moment (late 1920s New York) matters. Modernism still looked to many like an imported irritant - abstract, foreign, faintly hostile to traditional taste. To say the museum “filled a very important gap” is to recast that friction as mere absence: the city simply lacked an institution sophisticated enough to domesticate the new. Rockefeller’s business-trained vocabulary - “gap,” “filled” - borrows the logic of markets and infrastructure. Culture becomes a service, modern art a kind of public utility. It’s a philanthropic pitch that sounds like management.

The subtext is also about power laundering. MoMA didn’t just exhibit modern art; it standardized it, told patrons what counted, and turned experimentation into a canon that could be collected, funded, and exported as part of America’s self-image. “Most people” is a strategic vagueness, implying broad democratic approval while sidestepping whose tastes were elevated and whose were ignored. Rockefeller’s sentence isn’t just remembering history; it’s smoothing it, presenting elite institution-building as inevitable progress once the public “caught up.”