Dubuffet on Cultural Parasites

Our machine for cultural distribution, made up of the immense number of agents and servants of the State, of professors, columnists, commentators and all merchants, speculators and commercial agents, constitutes a body as cumbersome and parasitic as the network of middlemen who devour all the profit in agriculture and industry . . . as this body of parasites becomes stronger, it gets the idea, and seeks to impose it, that art is a matter of interpretation and discovery more than it is of creation, and that thus the true producers in this field are not the artists but those who present their works and win acceptance for them.

— Jean Dubuffet, Asphyxiating Culture and Other Writings