Art & Creativity Quote by David Elliott

Elliott’s line lands like a velvet-rope policy for taste: if you weren’t born with the right palate, don’t pretend you can tell what’s good. The key word is “born,” a neat piece of cultural gatekeeping dressed up as humility. It doesn’t just elevate expertise; it naturalizes it, implying that art judgment isn’t learned through looking, arguing, and failing, but inherited like eye color. That move flatters “connoisseurs” while discouraging everyone else from trusting their own encounters with a painting, a song, a performance.

The intent reads as a defense of hierarchy at a time when hierarchy keeps getting mugged by the internet. In a world of algorithmic recommendations, museum selfie lines, and critics competing with creators and fans in the same comment section, asserting an inborn authority is a way to re-secure status. “Superior” is doing a lot of work too: it smuggles in the idea that artistic value is objective and legible to a special class, rather than negotiated by institutions, markets, and communities.

As a celebrity voice, it’s also a subtle brand statement: proximity to “real” art as social capital. If taste is innate, then the people who already have access (education, money, networks) get to read that access as destiny, not advantage. The subtext isn’t just “trust experts,” it’s “accept the ranking system that keeps experts on top.” Art, ironically, has always been one of the places where outsiders learn to see differently; this quote tries to close that door before you even touch the handle.