Art & Creativity Quote by Ben Okri

Okri’s line draws a bright, almost provocative boundary between spectacle and truth. “Magic” is the oldest creative trick: conceal the mechanism, control the audience’s gaze, let mystery do the heavy lifting. When he says magic “becomes art” only when it has nothing to hide, he flips the usual power of enchantment. The real transformation isn’t making the impossible seem possible; it’s refusing to rely on secrecy at all.

The intent reads like a manifesto for a certain kind of artistry: not the performance that dazzles through misdirection, but the work that can withstand scrutiny. Art, in this framing, isn’t diminished by being understood. If anything, transparency is the test of its strength. The “nothing to hide” clause carries moral charge. Okri isn’t only talking about technique; he’s talking about integrity. A poem that needs smoke and mirrors - fashionable obscurity, borrowed mystique, cultivated vagueness - is still “magic,” still a trick. Art is what remains when the trick is exposed and the feeling survives.

Context matters: Okri’s writing often lives in the borderlands between realism and the mythic, a mode critics label magical realism but that, for him, functions as a political and spiritual grammar. Postcolonial literature is frequently forced to justify its “magic” as metaphor or exotic color. Okri’s subtext pushes back: the mythic isn’t a cover story. When the work can lay its cards on the table - history, violence, desire, power - and still enchant, that’s not escapism. That’s craft with courage.