“The public wants what it can’t get”

“The public wants what it can’t get” is Diana Vreeland’s defense of cultural institutions that shape public taste instead of treating immediate public preference as their guide. Spoken over lunch while she discussed changes to a Russian costume exhibition, the line states her conviction that museums should teach audiences what to want—and accompanies her praise of Interview as an exception among contemporary magazines.

The Lunch and Its Setting

Vreeland made the remark at a lunch arranged for her and an Argentinian woman. Bob had invited Michael and Pat York; Carole Rogers and Sally from Interview had also invited a hi-fi representative hoping to sell the magazine advertising. The sales pitch gave the gathering a practical magazine-business dimension, while Vreeland’s account of a museum exhibition turned the conversation toward the question of who should shape cultural taste.

A Museum’s Responsibility

Vreeland said the museum had increased the lights and lowered the music at her Russian costume show after visitors complained that they could not see properly and that the music was too loud. She objected to making those changes simply because people had asked for them. In her view, giving audiences what they already said they wanted was precisely the problem: museums had a responsibility to teach the public what to want. The aphorism captures that reversal, presenting desire not as a fixed standard institutions must satisfy but as something cultural institutions can educate.

The Exception of Interview

Vreeland extended her criticism from the museum to publishing. She described Vogue and the other magazines of the day as part of the same problem, then singled out Interview as an exception. Her remark therefore does more than dismiss popular demand: it sets her standard for cultural leadership against the magazines she considered compliant and places Interview, represented at the lunch by its staff, on the side of that distinction.