Life & Wisdom Quote by David Antin

Antin isn’t being precious about art; he’s being tactical about power. “Entertainment in its current form” sounds like a neutral category until he snaps it into focus: it arrives with an audience pre-shaped by the market. The rejection isn’t of pleasure or accessibility, but of the social contract embedded in the word entertainment: you perform, they consume, everyone agrees not to ask too much of the exchange.

As a poet known for talk pieces and improvisational, essay-like performances, Antin worked in a lineage that treats attention as the real medium. His line implies that contemporary entertainment manufactures a certain kind of listener: one trained to expect payoff, narrative closure, emotional cues on schedule. That audience doesn’t just receive the work; it disciplines the work in advance. If your venue is entertainment, you inherit assumptions about pacing, relatability, even likability. The crowd comes with invisible instructions attached.

The subtext is faintly combative: don’t blame artists when art gets flattened; blame the infrastructure that teaches people what to want and how quickly to want it. Antin’s refusal reads less like a snub and more like an ethics statement. He’s protecting a space where boredom, ambiguity, and digression aren’t failures but methods - where the audience isn’t treated as a demographic segment but as a thinking partner.

It’s also a warning about cultural identity: to accept entertainment is to accept the identity it assigns you. Antin’s point is that the audience isn’t merely out there waiting; it’s part of the product.