Art & Creativity Quote by Charles Bukowski

A Bukowski line like this isn’t a manifesto so much as a barstool molotov: a crude little sentence designed to scorch pretension on contact. “Great art is horseshit” plays like sacrilege, but it’s really a jab at the kind of cultural piety that turns art into a museum rope line, guarded by tastemakers and self-appointed priests. He’s not just rejecting “great art”; he’s rejecting the social theater around it - the grants, the panels, the reverent whispers that make ordinary people feel unqualified to have a reaction.

Then he swerves into “buy tacos”, a comic punchline that doubles as an ethic. Tacos aren’t lofty; they’re immediate, cheap, greasy, public. The subtext is: stop auditioning for seriousness and take care of your actual body, your appetite, your day. Bukowski built his brand on that collision - the profane and the supposedly profound - because it flatters no one. It dares the reader to choose life over pose.

Context matters: Bukowski’s work lives in the shadow of mid-century literary gatekeeping and the myth of the tortured genius. He both benefited from that myth and mocked it. The line reads as self-loathing and sales pitch at once: art is bullshit, he says, while writing another line you’ll repeat. That’s the trick. By dragging “great art” down into the street, he makes room for a different kind of greatness: not polished, not authorized, but stubbornly alive.