Creativity Quote by Salvador Dali

Good taste is the quiet cop at the edge of the canvas, and Dali wants it disarmed. Calling it a force that "sterilize[s]" is more than provocation; it’s a diagnosis of how culture polices imagination. Taste, in the polite sense, doesn’t just prefer certain colors or compositions. It filters risk out of the work before the work can even happen. Sterility is the point: the product looks clean, acceptable, museum-ready, and dead on arrival.

Dali’s bite lands in the absolutism of "alone" and "always". He’s not arguing that craft is irrelevant; he’s saying that the social instinct to be liked, to appear refined, becomes a preemptive self-censorship. "First handicap" names the initial compromise: before you wrestle with form or meaning, you’ve already decided what you won’t do. Creativity, in his view, needs the freedom to be vulgar, irrational, embarrassing, even wrong. Good taste turns that freedom into a checklist.

The context matters. Dali rose inside Surrealism, a movement built on sabotaging bourgeois reason and decorum, then became a celebrity who understood spectacle as a medium. His own career is a case study in treating offense, kitsch, and excess as tools, not accidents. The subtext is a warning aimed at institutions too: academies, critics, collectors, and the market all reward "taste" because it’s legible and safe. Dali is arguing that the moment art tries to pass the room’s etiquette test, it forfeits its most dangerous and generative power.