Creativity Quote by Francis Picabia

Speed is Picabia's weapon here: five minutes versus immortality, gadget versus masterpiece. He rigs the comparison so "lasting" looks like a prudish virtue and boredom the real crime. Coming from an artist who ricocheted through Cubism, Dada, and a lifelong allergy to sanctimony, the line is less a defense of shallowness than an attack on art's cathedral mentality - the idea that cultural value is proved by endurance, seriousness, and a certain approved slowness.

Picabia is writing in the wake of modernity's new tempo: machines, advertising, cinema, mass print, the whole world reorganized around attention. The "gadget" isn't just a trinket; it's a symbol of modern life, designed to seduce, to deliver a jolt, to be obsolete on schedule. By calling that "worth more" than immortal boredom, he flips the museum's moral hierarchy. Posterity becomes suspect: if an artwork survives but fails to move anyone, what is it surviving for - a shelf label, a syllabus, a curator's résumé?

The subtext is Dada's scorched-earth critique of cultural prestige after World War I, when traditional ideals of "eternal" beauty looked complicit, or at least irrelevant, next to industrialized slaughter. Better the brief spark - the joke, the provocation, the sexy new thing - than the mausoleum of taste. Picabia isn't telling you to prefer junk; he's daring you to admit how much art depends on impact, not incense.