Life & Wisdom Quote by Ishmael Reed

Reed’s line is a sly correction aimed at two audiences who rarely share a table: the left critic who treats capitalism as cultural poison, and the market evangelist who talks as if commerce automatically equals virtue. By opening with the almost grudging “not a bad idea,” he dodges purity tests. It’s the language of someone who’s watched ideology calcify into manners, and he refuses to play along.

The hinge is “and has produced art.” Reed isn’t praising the marketplace as a benevolent patron; he’s pointing to an inconvenient historical record. Jazz, paperback pulp, Hollywood, hip-hop, even the small-press hustle that kept many writers alive: American culture has repeatedly emerged from systems where money, risk, and audience appetite shape what gets made. The subtext is both pragmatic and provocative: if you want to understand art in the U.S., you can’t pretend the cash register isn’t in the room.

Coming from Reed, that pragmatism has teeth. His career has been defined by satirical warfare against gatekeepers - academic, critical, political - and by a suspicion of any single orthodoxy claiming moral ownership of culture. The line also reads as a defense of the artist as entrepreneur, especially for Black creators historically shut out of “respectable” patronage and forced to invent parallel circuits: clubs, labels, independent publishing, self-mythology. Reed’s provocation isn’t that markets are pure, but that they’re fertile - and that cultural judgment looks ridiculous when it can’t admit where art actually comes from.