Faith & Spirit Quote by Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono doesn’t flatter the audience here; she provokes it. “Everybody’s an artist. Everybody’s God” is an intentionally outrageous leveling move, the kind of line that dares you to roll your eyes before you notice the trap: if creativity and divinity are universal, then the real scandal isn’t talent or holiness - it’s how efficiently society trains people to distrust their own agency.

The sentence structure does the work. Two sweeping, almost messianic claims land like chants, then Ono snaps them down to a mundane diagnosis: “It’s just that they’re inhibited.” That “just” is doing knife work. It shrinks what people treat as fate (“I’m not creative,” “I’m not special”) into a solvable problem: permission. The subtext is less “you are all geniuses” than “you’ve been disciplined into passivity.”

Context matters. Ono comes out of Fluxus and conceptual art, where the point isn’t virtuoso craft so much as reframing attention - instructions, participation, everyday acts as art. She also lived through a culture that loved to mythologize solitary (usually male) genius, then reacted harshly when a woman insisted that art could be communal, playful, and politically charged. Calling everyone “God” reads like counter-programming against institutions - galleries, critics, churches, husbands, nation-states - that gatekeep meaning.

It’s also a statement about fear: inhibition as social control, internalized. Ono’s line doesn’t promise you a masterpiece. It offers something more radical: the right to make one, and to treat your imagination as a form of power rather than a private hobby.