Art & Creativity Quote by Herbert Read

Read’s line lands with the calm authority of someone trying to rewire how a general audience looks at art. “The modern work of art…is a symbol” isn’t a mystical shrug; it’s a strategic repositioning. In a culture that still expected painting and sculpture to behave like windows onto the world, Read insists they function more like signs: condensed, constructed carriers of meaning rather than mirrors of appearances.

The phrasing matters. “As I have said” signals a critic in mid-argument, not a poet in reverie. He’s staking out ground in a longer debate about modernism’s alleged obscurity or elitism. If modern art is “a symbol,” then its departures from realism aren’t failures of skill or communication; they’re the point. Abstraction, distortion, fragmentation: these become ways to encode psychological states, social tensions, even spiritual hunger in a form that refuses easy translation.

The subtext is defensive and ambitious at once. Defensive, because symbol-talk offers a rebuttal to the common complaint that modern art is meaningless scribble. Ambitious, because it elevates modern art into the realm of language, where interpretation is active work and viewers aren’t passive consumers. Read, writing in a century shaped by world wars, mass media, and the collapse of old certainties, treats representation as inadequate to modern life. Symbol becomes the modern artist’s workaround: a compressed unit of feeling and thought built for an age that no longer trusts surfaces to tell the truth.