Art is dangerous. It is one of the attractions: when it ceases to be dangerous you don’t want it.

Ellington frames art’s value as inseparable from risk: the willingness to unsettle, to challenge taste, morals, politics, or even the artist’s own habits. “Dangerous” here is less about physical peril than about volatility—art that can offend, disrupt complacency, or open new possibilities. For a jazz bandleader who constantly balanced popular entertainment with innovation, the remark also suggests that vitality comes from staying near the edge of the unknown: improvisation, experimentation, and the possibility of failure. When art becomes entirely safe—predictable, purely decorative, or market-calibrated—it loses the tension that makes audiences feel something at stake, and thus loses its allure.