Happiness Quote by Rudolf Bing

Bing’s line is a velvet-gloved slap at the people who claim to own “taste.” “Nobody likes us” gestures toward the familiar ecosystem around big cultural institutions: critics looking for blood, donors wanting deference, artists wanting more rehearsal and fewer compromises, insiders policing status. Then he pivots: “but the public.” The conjunction is the knife. If the audience shows up, the rest of the disapproval can be filed under background noise.

Coming from Rudolf Bing, the famously tough-minded impresario who ran the Metropolitan Opera through mid-century expansion, it reads like a mission statement disguised as a shrug. He’s defending an institution often accused of elitism by insisting that its true constituency isn’t the gatekeepers; it’s the people in the seats. The wording is canny: “perfectly happy” performs calm in the face of snobbery, and “the public” is both democratic and impersonal, a mass that can’t be privately flattered or easily bullied.

The subtext is a power play about legitimacy. In the arts, you’re always being tried in two courts: the professional class that narrates your value, and the paying crowd that finances your survival. Bing is announcing which verdict matters. It’s also a quiet rebuke to cultural prestige itself: if your work depends on being liked by insiders, maybe it’s not an institution so much as a club.

There’s a modern bite here, too: an early version of “ratio me all you want; the numbers are on my side,” except Bing’s numbers are ticket stubs and full houses.