Art & Creativity Quote by Mark Morris

Mark Morris is doing two things at once: defending a masterpiece and throwing shade at an entire ecosystem that keeps mishandling it. The opening jab, "choreographed so badly so many times", isn’t just a complaint about taste; it’s a diagnosis of canon culture. Certain works become obligatory assignments in the arts, and obligation breeds lazy interpretation, reverence without rigor, and versions that coast on the original’s prestige. Morris’s bluntness is strategic: he punctures the polite consensus that “any staging is better than none” and insists that bad re-makings don’t merely fail - they actively distort public memory of the piece.

"I’m loathe to do it" signals an artist’s dread of entering a crowded, booby-trapped conversation. When a work is “seminal,” you don’t just make choreography; you make a claim about history. Morris is wary of the ego trap (who am I to touch this?) and the reputational trap (why add to the pile?). Yet the pivot - “but I may eventually” - reveals the deeper subtext: responsibility. If the field keeps getting it wrong, abstaining starts to look like complicity.

The final clause, “one of the seminal artworks of the twentieth century,” elevates the stakes beyond dance gossip. Morris frames the piece as cultural infrastructure, the kind that shapes how we understand modernism itself. His intent isn’t to announce ambition; it’s to justify intervention. He’s positioning his eventual version as corrective stewardship: not novelty for novelty’s sake, but an attempt to restore the work’s force by taking it seriously enough to risk failing in public.