Creativity Quote by Ben Shahn

For an artist who spent his career making images that wanted to argue with power, Shahn’s admission lands like a strategic shrug. “It’s pretty hard to measure influence of written or visual material” isn’t false modesty; it’s a warning about the temptation to treat art like a policy memo with trackable outcomes. Influence is the wrong kind of effect to audit. It’s delayed, ambient, and often misattributed - less a straight line than a slow seep.

Shahn worked in the thick of 20th-century persuasion: WPA murals, political posters, documentary photography, the visual language of labor and protest. That era fetishized mass communication while also learning, brutally, how propaganda and advertising could bend perception. His line carries that historical tension. If images and texts can move crowds, why can’t we prove it? Because the most consequential shifts happen in private: a changed metaphor, a new threshold of empathy, a suspicion planted, a vocabulary acquired. Art doesn’t “convert” so much as it recalibrates what feels thinkable.

The phrase “pretty hard” matters. It’s plainspoken, almost conversational, refusing the heroic myth of the artist as a guaranteed engine of social change. Shahn is carving out ethical room for making work that’s politically committed without pretending it’s politically measurable. The subtext is both humility and resistance: humility about outcomes, resistance to the bureaucratic demand that cultural labor justify itself in numbers. In that gap between impact and proof, Shahn locates art’s real power - slippery, cumulative, and impossible to fully domesticate.