Art & Creativity Quote by Camille Paglia

Paglia’s line swings like a gavel at a faculty meeting: short, declarative, impatient with the polite murk that often passes for “serious” art talk. “Cant” is the loaded word here. It’s not just cliché; it’s sanctimony, the pre-approved moral vocabulary that signals belonging. Paglia’s specific intent is to warn that when artists (and especially arts institutions) start speaking in pieties, they stop seeing. Creativity, for her, is an appetite: messy, libidinal, unruly. Cant is the muzzle that gets applauded as “responsibility.”

The subtext is a culture-war critique aimed at gatekeepers who confuse virtue with vision. Paglia has long positioned herself against what she views as academic orthodoxies - theory-speak, ideological litmus tests, the social choreography of saying the right things. The sentence works because it’s a “rule” that breaks the mood it condemns: blunt instead of euphemistic, adversarial instead of consensual. Even the alliteration (“Cant kills creativity”) gives it the feel of a slogan, which is part of the provocation: she’s using a meme-like punch to attack meme-like thinking.

Context matters: Paglia emerged as a celebrity intellectual arguing that art history, sexuality, and aesthetic greatness can’t be reduced to moral instruction. Read in the late-20th-century campus climate she’s been battling since Sexual Personae, the quote is less a neutral aphorism than a dare - stop performing correctness, start risking ugliness, desire, contradiction. It’s a defense of art as transgression, and a warning that the fastest way to sterilize it is to make it speak like an institution.