Creativity Quote by El Lissitzky

A rallying cry dressed up as a blueprint, El Lissitzky's line turns craft into a political category. The phrase "new guild" deliberately raids the medieval past not for nostalgia, but for infrastructure: a collective identity with shared standards, training, and dignity. In the early Soviet century, that matters. Lissitzky is speaking from the churn of post-revolutionary culture, when art was being asked to justify itself not as private genius but as public utility. The guild is his answer to the museum's loneliness.

The real target is embedded in the insult of "arrogant barrier". He isn't just condemning snobbery; he's attacking a whole economy of prestige in which "artist" becomes a social rank and "craftsman" the invisible labor beneath it. By naming the distinction as class, he maps aesthetic hierarchy onto the same stratified world the revolution claimed it would abolish. The subtext: if art keeps its old caste system, it will reproduce the old society, even with new slogans on the walls.

What's clever is how the sentence rewires authorship. A "craftsman" implies process, repeatability, technique; an "artist" implies exception, aura, individual signature. Lissitzky wants the aura to evaporate into production, into posters, books, exhibitions, architecture - the designed environment where ideology becomes lived experience. This isn't a plea for artists to be humbler. It's a bid to reorganize culture so that making and meaning share the same shop floor.