Art & Creativity Quote by Richard Schickel

Schickel’s line flatters its subject while quietly indicting the cultural gatekeepers who forced the invention in the first place. “First to conceive” isn’t just a historical claim; it’s a way of granting authorship to an attitude: the refusal to accept that “art” is whatever museums, publishers, and polite critics say it is. The sentence builds its own miniature origin myth. Traditional arts “would not find room for him” sounds passive, almost architectural, as if exclusion is simply a spatial problem. But the subtext is harsher: institutions don’t merely overlook talent; they police legitimacy. The hero’s answer isn’t to petition for entry. It’s to build a new house.

That’s why the second sentence lands. “Make an art form of his own” frames cinema not as technological novelty but as self-authored legitimacy, art by necessity and by will. Schickel, a longtime film critic, is also speaking to the perpetual insecurity of movies in the cultural hierarchy: film has always had to argue for its seriousness against charges of commerce, mass taste, and mechanical reproduction. By locating cinema’s “art” status in a single act of belief, he reframes the medium’s legitimacy as something created, not bestowed.

The intent is double: canonize a pioneer and remind readers that “art forms” are often born from exclusion, not permission. It’s a neat piece of criticism that smuggles in a democratic provocation: if the establishment won’t name you, you can name the medium.