Art & Creativity Quote by Suzanne Farrell

There’s a sly little pivot in Suzanne Farrell’s line: it takes a setting that sounds wholesome and instructional - “the art class” - and flips it into a quietly brazen punchline. The emphasis lands on “of course,” a two-word shrug that’s doing heavy lifting. It’s not just certainty; it’s an assertion of inevitability. In Farrell’s mouth, it reads less like vanity than like a dancer’s deadpan recognition of how a certain kind of body, and a certain kind of beauty, gets sorted into roles before anyone asks what else it can do.

The subtext is about being watched for a living. Ballet trains performers to treat the body as both instrument and image, disciplined and displayed. “I was the model” carries that duality: she’s the subject of study, but also an object arranged for other people’s eyes. In an “art class,” the gaze is framed as refined, educational, safe. Farrell’s wryness hints at the convenient fiction that aesthetic looking is neutral. She’s puncturing it with humor, letting the listener hear the power dynamic without turning it into a lecture.

Context matters because Farrell wasn’t just any dancer; she became a defining American ballerina in an era when Balanchine’s troupe-making could feel like destiny. The line reads like a small autobiography: her talent was real, but so was the cultural machinery that turned her physical presence into her first headline. It’s a clean, comic sentence that leaves a faint bruise.