Art & Creativity Quote by Ben Shahn

Shahn makes curating sound like admin work, but the sentence is really a quiet flex about power: who gets seen, who gets framed, who gets folded into “art.” The tell is “ideologically.” He isn’t describing photography as a hobby or a tool; he’s treating it as a position. In the 1930s and 40s, when Shahn was moving between painting, graphic work, and documentary projects tied to New Deal culture, photography wasn’t just an aesthetic choice. It was a claim about reality: what counts as evidence, what deserves public attention, what kind of images a democracy should circulate about itself.

The line’s breathless structure mirrors how institutions get built in practice: impressed, involved, arranged, picked, exhibited. He slides from conviction to infrastructure in one run-on motion. That’s the subtext: ideology without access is just opinion, but ideology with a venue becomes culture. By naming the College Art Association and New York, Shahn situates himself at the choke points of legitimacy. An “exhibition” is not merely a display; it’s an argument delivered with wall labels and lighting, a way to smuggle a worldview into the canon under the respectable cover of “work we were doing.”

There’s also an almost disarming candor in “I picked the photographs.” Today we’d call that gatekeeping; Shahn treats it as duty. The intent isn’t to confess control but to naturalize it: if you’re “very involved ideologically,” selection becomes responsibility. In that sense, the quote captures Shahn’s larger project - art as civic intervention, not private expression.