Politics & Power Quote by Herbert Read

Art has always liked its distances. Herbert Read, writing as a poet-critic with one foot in modernism and another in political idealism, is naming a tension that polite culture tries to wish away: art’s appetite for hierarchy inside a world increasingly committed, at least in theory, to equality. “Aristocratic” here isn’t just about rich patrons and museum donors; it’s about art’s built-in logic of exclusion. Serious art asks for training, time, literacy, taste. It sorts. It creates insiders and outsiders, canons and footnotes, “the educated ear” versus the casual listener. Even when it claims to speak for everyone, it often speaks in dialects only a minority can parse.

Read’s sting is the word “function.” He’s not moralizing about snobs; he’s arguing that art’s social job has historically been to refine, to intensify, to discriminate among forms and meanings - the opposite of democracy’s promise of equal standing. Modern society can subsidize the arts, expand access, broadcast masterpieces to every screen, and still not abolish the fact that some work demands apprenticeship while other work is designed for immediate consumption. Democratization changes the audience; it doesn’t erase the ladder.

The bleakness (“can ever be resolved”) is also a defense of difficulty. Read is implicitly resisting the idea that mass approval is the proper measure of value. In a century of propaganda, advertising, and standardized entertainment, he’s warning that when art is forced to behave democratically - to be instantly legible, broadly agreeable - it risks becoming culture’s customer service desk rather than its irritant and provocation.