Art & Creativity Quote by John Guare

Guare lands the punchline first: people file past beauty the way they browse luxury goods, hunting the price tag for permission to feel impressed. The “Wow” is doing double duty - a childlike gasp and a nasty little verdict on an audience trained to translate aesthetic pleasure into market value. It’s a line that understands museums as social theaters: you’re not just looking at a painting, you’re performing taste, class, and fluency in a world where money is the most legible language.

The pivot comes fast. “The practical value” sounds like a concession to the very mindset he’s mocking, as if art has to justify itself the way a toaster or a stock does. Then Guare flips the term: the “practical” use of art isn’t economic at all, it’s evidentiary. A painting proves something about capacity - patience, imagination, obsession, technique, risk. It’s a receipt, not for what it cost, but for what a mind can make.

As a playwright, Guare is especially attuned to the gap between what people say they came for and what they’re actually there to do. He’s writing in the late-20th-century afterglow of pop art, auction headlines, and culture-as-commodity, when the art world’s glamour and finance became part of the exhibition. The subtext isn’t anti-money so much as anti-reduction: if all you see is the price, you miss the point that the work is already a human victory, regardless of its market costume.