Art & Creativity Quote by Morton Feldman

A little acid, a little mournful: Feldman is needling music for lacking the kind of cultural monument that painting gets to claim in a single name. “Rembrandt” isn’t just shorthand for genius; it’s shorthand for a whole apparatus of recognition - a stable canon, a gallery economy, a visual permanence that lets a painting sit there for centuries, accruing authority. Music, in Feldman’s telling, doesn’t get that kind of fixed object. It evaporates as it happens, then returns as interpretation, always contingent on performers, halls, and attention spans. Without a Rembrandt, the art form can’t so easily masquerade as an heirloom.

The sting in “nothing more than musicians” is deliberate. Feldman isn’t insulting craft; he’s pointing at a status problem. In the 20th-century concert world he inhabited - postwar modernism, universities, grant culture, and the long shadow of Beethoven as the last broadly legible “great man” - composers were both venerated and ignored, treated as specialists making work for specialists. Painting can produce a single, incontestable icon; music keeps producing events.

There’s also self-defense here. Feldman’s own aesthetic - long durations, hushed dynamics, obsessive repetition - resists the easy masterpiece narrative. It’s anti-monumental, closer to a room you inhabit than a statue you salute. The line reads like an indictment, but it’s also a credo: if music can’t crown a Rembrandt, maybe it shouldn’t try. It can stay stubbornly temporary, intimate, and uncollectable - and that, for Feldman, is the point.