Art & Creativity Quote by Robert Morgan

Morgan’s jab lands because it treats “newness” not as an artistic virtue but as a sales pitch. By comparing avant-garde poetry to the annual Chevrolet model refresh, he collapses the romance of innovation into the logic of the showroom: a slightly altered grille marketed as progress. The line’s power is its insult-by-analogy. It doesn’t argue that experimentation is bad; it suggests the word “new” has been hijacked by consumer culture, turning art into a product cycle and artists into reluctant brand managers.

Coming from a soldier, the suspicion carries a particular edge. Military life trains you to detect slogans, to watch how institutions use language to manufacture consent and morale. Morgan sounds less like a museum scold than someone wary of rhetoric that pretends to be brave. “Avant-garde” is literally a military term, the forward detachment. He’s calling out the way that martial glamour gets smuggled into aesthetics: the poet as commando, the poem as raid. In his view, that posture can become its own kind of uniform.

The subtext isn’t nostalgia for old forms so much as distrust of churn. Real artistic change, Morgan implies, isn’t an annual makeover you can schedule and sell; it’s slower, riskier, and often indistinguishable from continuity until time proves otherwise. His cynicism punctures a modern cultural habit: mistaking novelty for value, and mistaking the market’s appetite for movement for history itself.