Time & Perspective Quote by Pauline Kael

Kael’s provocation is slyly political: she smuggles the artist into the category of national infrastructure. Not a luxury, not a garnish for the educated, but a condition for “the future of our country and of civilization.” Coming from America’s most famous film critic, that’s less a misty romantic defense of creativity than a hard-edged argument about power: whoever gets to imagine freely helps set the terms of what a society can think, desire, and tolerate.

The phrase “full recognition of the place of the artist” carries a quiet rebuke to a culture that applauds art while trying to domesticate artists. Recognition here isn’t applause or awards; it’s legitimacy. It’s funding without obedience, space without moralistic supervision, and criticism that doesn’t double as policing. Kael knew the pressure points intimately: the mid-century U.S. had its blacklist scars, its censorship boards, its respectability panics, its endless demand that movies “uplift.” Her insistence that society “set the artist free” reads like a counter-brief against all of that - against the idea that art must earn its keep by serving patriotism, taste, or virtue.

Then she makes the case feel organic rather than ideological. “Nourish the roots of our culture” flips art from entertainment to ecosystem. Roots work underground; they’re messy, unglamorous, and indispensable. The kicker is “wherever it takes him”: not toward consensus, not toward comfort, but toward risk. Kael’s subtext is blunt: a society that can’t handle artists wandering off-script is already admitting how fragile its culture is.