Creativity Quote by Edgar Degas

Degas nails a very French species of amusement: the pleasure of being excluded. His “delightful” isn’t praise so much as a needle slid politely under the skin. Specialists, in his telling, produce a kind of verbal lacework so intricate it becomes useless to anyone outside the guild. The punchline - “One understands absolutely nothing and it's charming” - flips the usual hierarchy. Ignorance becomes a luxury good. You sit there, nodding, intoxicated by jargon the way you might be by an opera in a language you don’t speak: sound and confidence stand in for meaning.

The intent is double-edged. On one hand, Degas is admitting an aesthetic thrill in mastery overheard; expertise has music even when it has no access. On the other, he’s exposing how specialists can turn conversation into performance - a social technology that signals status, polices boundaries, and converts knowledge into a private club. “Absolutely nothing” is hyperbole that functions like a sketch artist’s exaggeration: it clarifies the feature he wants you to see, the willful opacity.

Context matters because Degas moved through the salons of late 19th-century Paris, where scientists, critics, collectors, and artists all competed to define modernity. His own field was being professionalized, theorized, and monetized; the Impressionists were forever being explained by people who didn’t paint. The subtext is a wary delight at that whole ecosystem: expertise is seductive, but it’s also a con, and the charm is part of how it gets away with it.