Creativity Quote by Hans Hofmann

Hofmann is taking a swing at the museum habit of treating a painting like a sacred object rather than a record of decisions. “Worship the product” is the art-world version of fetishizing the highlight reel: the finished canvas, the signature style, the saleable result. It flatters spectators and collectors because it asks nothing of them but awe. Hofmann’s jab is that this kind of reverence breeds dilettantism - a shallow, touristic relationship to art where taste replaces practice, and opinion substitutes for understanding.

The second charge, “reaction,” is sharper. If you ignore development, you also ignore risk: the experiments, failures, revisions, and technical problems that actually move art forward. You end up defending the already-approved forms, because only finished products can be canonized. That’s how “good taste” quietly becomes a political stance: not just conservative about aesthetics, but suspicious of change itself.

Context matters. Hofmann was both a modernist painter and a formidable teacher, shaping generations of American artists as abstraction took over mid-century culture. His studio philosophy insisted that process is not a backstage story; it is the artwork’s real content. The line reads like a corrective to instant verdicts and market validation: if you want to understand (or make) art, you have to follow the work while it’s still alive, still unsettled. Reverence is easy. Development demands attention, patience, and a tolerance for uncertainty.