Daily Inspiration Quote by Steven Berkoff

Berkoff’s jab lands because it’s both an aesthetic verdict and a class war skirmish disguised as backstage grousing. “The mainstream is generally garbage” is blunt on purpose: it refuses the polite language of arts funding panels and critics’ blurbs, where mediocrity is often padded with “accessible,” “crowd-pleasing,” or “necessary for sustainability.” He’s not just saying popular work is bad; he’s accusing the cultural center of rewarding safety, smoothing edges, and calling it excellence.

The second sentence sharpens the knife. “Look at the heavily subsidized theaters” turns what could be a subjective taste complaint into a structural indictment. Subsidy, in his framing, doesn’t nurture risk; it bankrolls complacency. The subtext is that public money is being used to underwrite institutional taste-making that’s timid, managerial, and politically unthreatening. It’s a provocation aimed at the gatekeepers: if you have resources most artists can’t dream of, why are you producing work that feels like a committee decision?

Context matters because Berkoff comes out of a tradition that prizes ferocity: physical theater, stylization, a suspicion of bourgeois realism and middlebrow respectability. His career has long rubbed against the polished West End and the prestige machine. So the line isn’t neutral critique; it’s a rallying cry for outsider energy, a reminder that “mainstream” can function less as a measure of quality than as a protective ecosystem. He’s daring audiences to notice when cultural “importance” is just expensive habit.