Art & Creativity Quote by Jessica Hagedorn

A warning disguised as a vibe check: Hagedorn draws a hard line between cultural curiosity and cultural strip-mining. The phrase "just to make it sound groovy" skewers the lazy cosmopolitanism of artists who treat non-Western traditions like spice racks - a pinch of Tibet to signal depth, difference, edge. Her target isn't sampling itself; it's sampling as shortcut, an aesthetic of borrowed authenticity that flatters the borrower and erases the borrowed-from.

The pivot, "but you do your homework", matters because it refuses purity politics. Hagedorn isn't arguing for sealed-off cultures; she's arguing for responsibility. "Homework" implies labor, time, humility, and accountability - the unglamorous parts of art-making that don't photograph well. It also hints at relationships: learning from people, histories, and contexts rather than from a CD labeled "world". In that sense, the line is less about permission slips than about competence and ethics. If you can't explain what you're taking, you probably shouldn't be taking it.

As a playwright shaped by diaspora and the churn of late-20th-century multicultural branding, Hagedorn speaks from a world where "exotic" becomes a marketing category and where Asian and indigenous cultures are routinely aestheticized while the people attached to them are marginalized. The intent is protective, but not precious: make the work, cross the borders, mash things up - just don't confuse consumption with understanding.