Art & Creativity Quote by Yoko Ono

Provocative in its simplicity, Yoko Ono’s line refuses the romantic fog that often surrounds music. “People make music to get a reaction” punctures the myth of the pure, solitary genius creating for art’s sake. She frames music as an act with an audience implied from the first note: you don’t just express yourself, you aim yourself. That word “reaction” is blunt on purpose. It covers pleasure and outrage, comfort and irritation, the whole spectrum of feeling a listener can’t help but produce. In Ono’s worldview, indifference is the real failure.

The second sentence, “Music is communication,” flips the first from accusation to infrastructure. If music is a message, then taste becomes politics: who gets listened to, whose noise is dismissed, what counts as “musical,” what gets coded as talent versus nuisance. Coming from an artist who spent decades being treated as an interloper in rock history, the subtext lands sharply: if music is communication, then gatekeeping is censorship in softer clothes.

Context matters here. Ono emerged from the avant-garde and Fluxus traditions where art is instruction, event, provocation - less about virtuosity than about contact. Her work often courts misunderstanding, which makes “reaction” feel like a strategic embrace of friction. She’s not asking music to be agreeable; she’s insisting it be legible as an exchange. The line also reads as a defense against the tired critique that experimental sound is “not music.” Ono’s reply: if it reaches you, it’s already doing the job.