Art & Creativity Quote by John Ciardi

A needle dipped in charm, Ciardi's line skewers modern art by framing it as a kind of self-inflicted abstraction: painters quit looking outward, quit desiring, and start admiring their own cleverness. The joke rides on a deliberately old-fashioned image of artistic fuel - "girls" as muse, subject, pretext for sensual looking - then yanks it away to suggest that the modernist turn is less revelation than rationalization. "Persuade themselves" is the tell: not discovery, not necessity, but a self-seduction into theory.

The intent is less to argue formally against modernism than to puncture its posture. By reducing avant-garde ambition to a psychological maneuver, Ciardi aims at the social performance surrounding modern art: the way manifestos, critical language, and insider consensus can make the artist look like a prophet while insulating the work from ordinary response. The subtext is a complaint about mediation. Modern art, in this view, isn't just harder to "get"; it's harder to trust, because it arrives with an implied lecture.

Context matters: Ciardi came of age when abstract expressionism and museum culture were remaking taste, when "serious" art increasingly needed an interpreter. As a dramatist - someone whose work lives or dies by audience attention in real time - he has little patience for art that seems to replace shared experience with private systems. Still, the barb reveals its own bias: it equates authenticity with heterosexual looking and casts innovation as vanity. The line works because it's funny, unfair, and uncomfortably diagnostic - a reminder that battles over aesthetics are often battles over who gets to define pleasure, intelligence, and legitimacy.