Politics & Power Quote by Eugenio Montale

Montale’s jab lands because it treats “democratic” as a word that’s been flattering itself for too long. He’s not attacking wider access to art so much as the way mass appeal can be smuggled in as a moral alibi: if everyone can like it, it must be good; if it sells, it must be relevant; if it’s legible at a glance, it must be honest. “In the worst sense of the word” is the tell. This is democracy as leveling, not liberation - an atmosphere where difficulty gets recoded as elitism and where the artwork’s right to be stubborn, private, or formally demanding starts to look like a social offense.

As a poet who made his name on compression, ambiguity, and hard-won perception, Montale is naturally suspicious of a visual culture that rewards immediacy. The line reads like a defense of attention itself: the slow apprenticeship of looking, the patience required to live with an image that doesn’t instantly “deliver.” In the 20th century, that anxiety has real teeth. Photography, advertising, cinema, glossy magazines, later television - the visual field becomes crowded, fast, and aggressively persuasive. The arts don’t just circulate more widely; they begin to borrow the tactics of the marketplace, where clarity is a sales technique and novelty is a churn.

The subtext is less “keep the masses out” than “don’t let popularity become the only credential.” Montale hears a cultural bargain being struck: in exchange for reach, the arts surrender their right to resist the viewer. That’s the “worst” democracy - not shared citizenship in culture, but the dictatorship of the quick glance.