Daily Inspiration Quote by Sarah Caldwell

America is a place where taste can be manufactured, packaged, and moved off shelves. Sarah Caldwell’s line lands because it borrows the language of consumer absurdity - “green toothpaste” - to make a hard-nosed argument about culture: opera doesn’t fail here because it’s too lofty; it fails when it’s treated as unmarketable.

The wit is in the inversion. Toothpaste is intimate, daily, and brutally practical; opera is coded as expensive, elitist, occasional. Caldwell collapses that hierarchy and points at the real engine of “popular” taste: persuasion. If advertising can convince millions that mint shouldn’t be white but neon green, then the barrier to opera isn’t the public’s intelligence. It’s the storytelling around it - the framing, the access, the invitation to care.

There’s also a sly jab at American capitalism’s confidence trick. “In this country” signals both pride and critique: a nation that can monetize anything should be able to monetize art, yet the fact we need the comparison exposes a cultural insecurity. Opera requires time, attention, and a willingness to feel in public - qualities the marketplace doesn’t naturally reward unless someone builds a bridge.

Caldwell, a conductor and impresario who fought to expand opera’s audience in a media-saturated era, isn’t begging for opera to be dumbed down. She’s insisting it be sold with the same unapologetic savvy as any other product, because the public is already trained to buy identities, not just goods. Opera can be one of them.