Success Quote by George P. Baker

Neglect doesn not strangle an art form; it just tilts the ecosystem toward its worst instincts. George P. Baker, a major early architect of American drama studies and training, is arguing against the comforting myth that theater will either thrive on its own or perish without support. Drama, he implies, is too durable to be killed by indifference. The real danger is more banal and more corrosive: when institutions, patrons, critics, and schools fail to demand craft and ambition, they quietly subsidize mediocrity.

The sentence works because it reverses the usual moral panic. Instead of warning that the stage will disappear, Baker warns that it will survive in a degraded form, swelling with “weakest and poorest elements” precisely because those are easiest to produce and easiest to sell when no one is cultivating alternatives. That’s a cultural economics point disguised as aesthetic concern: in a market left to default settings, cheap sensation, formula, and cliché have structural advantages. “Failing to encourage the best” is not neutral; it’s active selection pressure.

Context matters. Baker’s career spans the period when American theater was professionalizing, commercial Broadway was consolidating, and universities were beginning to treat drama as something teachable rather than merely entertainable. His subtext is institutional: training, public standards, and serious criticism aren’t elitist frills; they’re the counterweight to a system that will always overproduce the lowest-cost kind of excitement. The warning still lands because it’s really about culture in any medium: you don’t get a vacuum. You get slop.