Creativity Quote by Lara St. John

Lara St. John is naming the guilty little engine that powers a certain kind of “live music” fandom: the part of us that claims to want transcendence but secretly perks up at the possibility of a derailment. By comparing a botched concert to rubbernecking at an accident, she punctures the polite myth that audiences are always there “for the art.” Sometimes they’re there for the risk, the spectacle, the story they can retell with the same relish they pretend to disavow.

The intent isn’t to scold so much as to demystify the concert hall’s emotional economy. Classical performance, especially, sells control: perfection, discipline, the illusion that human bodies can be as reliable as machines. When something goes wrong - a broken string, a memory slip, a rogue phone, a stage mishap - the room snaps into a different mode. Attention sharpens. The evening becomes unrepeatable in a way that flawless execution rarely is. Failure, even minor, creates narrative, and narrative is what crowds metabolize.

The subtext is thornier: audiences may “support” performers, but they also consume them. A musician onstage is both artist and high-wire act, and the crowd’s empathy can mingle with a prurient curiosity about how exposed a professional will become under pressure. St. John’s line lands because it refuses sentimentality about spectatorship. It asks us to admit that our fascination with vulnerability isn’t an aberration of the internet age - it’s an old human reflex, just dressed up in concert attire.