Creativity Quote by Ad Reinhardt

Reinhardt’s line lands like a deadpan prank on anyone who shows up to art with a briefcase full of reverence. “Too serious” signals real stakes: art isn’t decoration, it’s a discipline with its own demands, histories, and hard-won standards. But “to be taken seriously” flips that solemnity into a warning about the kind of seriousness that turns art into religion, prestige theater, or a careerist marketplace of correct opinions. He’s not dismissing art; he’s mocking the social rituals that gather around it.

The intent tracks with Reinhardt’s role as a severe modernist and a committed purist (his nearly black “ultimate” paintings are basically arguments made in pigment). He wanted art to be experienced on its own terms, not as illustration, moral lesson, or lifestyle accessory. So the quote performs what it advocates: it refuses the pious tone, insists on rigor, then punctures the audience’s desire for certainty. The “serious” part belongs to the work; the “taken seriously” part belongs to institutions and viewers who often substitute posture for attention.

There’s also a sly institutional critique baked in. Mid-century American art was being professionalized, canonized, and sold at scale. Treating art “seriously” can mean treating it as cultural capital: a way to signal taste, class, ideology. Reinhardt’s paradox calls that bluff. If art is genuinely serious, it can’t survive being embalmed by solemn commentary. It needs room for play, risk, refusal, even boredom - the full spectrum that seriousness, in its social form, tries to discipline out of the experience.