Art & Creativity Quote by Stanley Crouch

Power, in Stanley Crouch's hands, is never just power; it's taste with consequences. "When you're artistic director of a program, you present the music you want to present" reads like a shrug, but it lands as a warning shot. Crouch spent his career insisting that jazz wasn't a lifestyle brand or a museum piece to be politely diversified. It was an art with standards, lineage, and a canon worth fighting over. So this line is less a neutral description of job duties than a defense of gatekeeping as artistic responsibility.

The intent is blunt: stop pretending programming is a democratic process. The subtext is sharper: if you're in charge and you hide behind committees, trends, or institutional "balance", you're laundering your preferences through bureaucracy. Crouch is saying the quiet part out loud: every season is someone's argument about what matters. In an era when arts institutions justify choices with audience metrics, grant language, or a vague commitment to "inclusion", he re-centers the one thing administrators often avoid naming - aesthetic judgment.

Context matters because Crouch was frequently at the center of controversies around Jazz at Lincoln Center and broader debates over who gets to define jazz's story. To admirers, the line affirms curatorial integrity: an artistic director should have a point of view, not a playlist. To critics, it's a tidy rationale for excluding music that doesn't fit that view. Either way, it works because it's disarmingly literal - a simple sentence that exposes the politics of culture: the person with the clipboard also holds the narrative.