Politics & Power Quote by Mikhail Baryshnikov

Baryshnikov isn’t just praising art classes; he’s drawing a line between what a society funds and what it claims to value. The phrase “especially in this country” carries the bite of an immigrant’s vantage point: someone who chose America, benefited from its cultural prestige, and is still blunt enough to note its public neglect. By naming government indifference so plainly, he reframes art education as a civic issue, not a feel-good elective. The subtext is budgeting as ideology: you can celebrate the arts on opening night and still starve the pipeline that creates artists, audiences, and cultural literacy.

His insistence that it’s “so important for young people” also signals something dancers understand early: discipline isn’t abstract. Training is daily, embodied, and time-sensitive; missed years don’t come back. In that light, cutting arts funding isn’t merely symbolic disrespect, it’s a structural decision that narrows who gets access. Private lessons and elite programs become the default, and talent quietly starts to correlate with ZIP code.

Context matters here: Baryshnikov’s career spans Cold War defection, the American arts boom, and the long slide into austerity politics where “STEM-first” rhetoric often treats creativity as garnish. Coming from an artist whose medium is physically ephemeral, the urgency lands. He’s arguing that art education is one of the few public tools that can manufacture possibility at scale - and that ignoring it is a choice with cultural consequences.