Time & Perspective Quote by Martin Kippenberger

Kippenberger’s line lands like a jab at the romantic myth of the artist as a vessel patiently awaiting inspiration. For him, ideas aren’t rare gems; they’re cheap, plentiful, and mildly annoying. The real scarcity is time: studio time, career time, bodily time. That inversion is the intent. It reframes “genius” away from having brilliant thoughts and toward the far messier business of choosing, executing, discarding, and moving on before the clock runs out.

The subtext is a critique of preciousness. If you have “less time than ideas,” you can’t afford to over-polish, over-explain, or treat each concept like it deserves a cathedral. Kippenberger’s own practice - sprawling, fast, promiscuous across mediums, steeped in jokes and provocation - makes the quote feel like a manifesto for productivity as an aesthetic. Not hustle-culture efficiency, but an ethic of refusal: refusal to let one “important” idea bully all the others into silence; refusal to let the art world’s demand for coherence turn an artist into a brand manager.

Context matters because Kippenberger worked in a late-20th-century European scene where irony was armor and the market was becoming a co-author. Saying time is the constraint is also a quiet admission of mortality and burnout, even as it performs bravado. It’s funny, a little cruel, and oddly tender: the artist isn’t blocked by emptiness, but overwhelmed by abundance - and judged by what they manage to rescue from it.