Art & Creativity Quote by David Rockefeller

Rockefeller isn’t praising boundary-pushing so much as registering a quiet shift in who gets to certify value. Coming from a man whose power lived in boards, institutions, and patronage, the line reads like a status report from the managerial class: the rules of the game have changed, and the gatekeepers are recalibrating.

The phrasing does a lot of work. “Conventional notions” sounds neutral, even sociological, but it smuggles in a preference for older standards without stating them. “A lot of things done today” is pointedly vague, the kind of sweep that lets the speaker signal skepticism while avoiding the risk of naming a specific artist or movement and being proven wrong by history. Then there’s the clincher: “considered works of art.” Not “are” art, but “considered” art - art as a designation granted by consensus, institutions, markets, and taste-makers. Rockefeller, steeped in the world where naming something creates its value (a stock, a building, a museum wing), understands that labels don’t merely describe reality; they manufacture it.

The subtext is less about aesthetics than about legitimacy: modern art isn’t just different, it’s different in a way that exposes how past “rejection” was also a kind of social enforcement. In the 20th century - alongside abstraction, conceptual art, performance, and pop - the art world became a laboratory for testing authority itself. Rockefeller’s sentence catches that friction: progress framed as drift, innovation as a loosening of standards, and cultural power moving from inherited “convention” to a more fluid, contested system of recognition.