Art & Creativity Quote by Rebecca West

West’s line is a small masterpiece of contempt dressed up as metaphor: “the camel of great art” is bulky, awkward, stubbornly alive; “the needle of mob intelligence” is the tiny, constricted aperture of collective taste. The joke is in the mismatch. Expecting art with scale and strangeness to squeeze through the crowd’s demand for instant legibility is not just hard; it’s structurally absurd. West doesn’t argue that the public is incapable of feeling. She argues the mob’s mode of thinking is engineered for simplification, for slogans, for what can be agreed upon quickly. Great art, by contrast, is often an argument with itself.

The biblical echo (camel, needle) matters because it carries a moral charge: the problem isn’t merely practical, it’s ethical. Mass opinion wants art to be “for” something uncomplicated - national pride, uplift, a lesson, a party line. West had reason to distrust that pressure. Writing across the first half of the 20th century, she watched propaganda, ideological fashion, and culture-as-tribal-badge harden into public appetite. Modernism’s difficulty wasn’t an accident; it was a refusal to be conscripted.

Subtext: stop asking artists to audition for popularity. “Mob intelligence” isn’t intelligence, in West’s phrasing; it’s a social reflex that rewards what travels fast and punishes what lingers. The intent is defensive and diagnostic at once: protect the roomy, ungainly animal of art from being starved into something sleek enough to sell.