I live in the USSR, work actively and count naturally on the worker and peasant spectator. If I am not comprehensible to them I should be deported.
About this quote
- What does it mean?
- Artists should serve their audience and remain accessible. Inaccessibility risks exile in authoritarian regimes.
- In plain terms
- Make art understandable to ordinary people or face consequences.
- What can you take from it?
- Connect with your audience or risk losing your platform.
Where it applies
Putting it to work
Questions to consider
- Should art be for everyone?
- What happens when art is too complex?
Another view
Accessibility can sometimes limit artistic innovation.
More from Dmitri Shostakovich
There can be no music without ideology. The old composers, whether they knew it or not, were upholding a political theory. Most of them, of course, were bolste…
Permalink to quote #2 What can be considered human emotions? Surely not only lyricism, sadness, tragedy? Doesn't laughter also have a claim to that lofty title? I want to fight for …
Permalink to quote #3 If they cut off both hands, I will compose music anyway holding the pen in my teeth.
Permalink to quote #4
Related quotes
What life means to me is to put the content of Shelley into the form of Zola. The proletarian writer is a writer with a purpose; he thinks no more of 'art for …
Upton SinclairUpton Sinclair quote #1 There can be no music without ideology. The old composers, whether they knew it or not, were upholding a political theory. Most of them, of course, were bolste…
Dmitri ShostakovichDmitri Shostakovich quote #2 In a nation run by swine, all pigs are upward-mobile and the rest of us are fucked until we can put our acts together: Not necessarily to Win, but mainly to ke…
Hunter S. ThompsonHunter S. Thompson quote #3