Time & Perspective Quote by Golda Meir

Modern art doesn’t just scandalize the public; it exposes it. Golda Meir’s line is a politician’s diagnosis delivered with the flat authority of someone who has watched crowds, cabinets, and commentators mistake unfamiliarity for fraud. The sting is in “conventional people”: not a neutral description, but an indictment of the social majority that treats its own comfort as a standard of truth. In Meir’s framing, the “public history” isn’t about artists heroically pushing boundaries. It’s about spectators repeatedly arriving late, insisting the new language must be nonsense because it doesn’t sound like the old one.

The subtext is political, even if the subject is painting. “Not knowing what they are dealing with” is the phrase you use for crises, enemies, negotiations - moments when ignorance becomes consequential, not merely embarrassing. Meir suggests that modern art functions like a stress test for civic imagination: it asks people to tolerate ambiguity, to admit uncertainty, to resist the reflex to police taste as if it were public order. The conventional response is to demand translation into the familiar - realism, moral clarity, “skill” - and then call the refusal to comply a con.

Context matters: Meir governed in an era when mass media made culture a public arena and consensus a political weapon. Read that way, her point isn’t that modern art is always good; it’s that the public’s initial hostility is predictable, almost procedural. The joke is dark: history keeps proving modern art right, and keeps excusing the people who didn’t recognize it.