Creativity Quote by Jack Levine

There is a sly grin hiding inside this act of self-sabotage. Jack Levine, a painter celebrated for his barbed social scenes, frames artistic integrity as a refusal to be domesticated: not noble, not enlightened, not elevated by success, just "mean" and "little" on purpose. The line plays defense against the cultural script that demands the artist mature into a tasteful institution. Levine is basically saying: if fame turns me respectable, it also turns me harmless.

The phrasing does a lot of work. "As far as I'm concerned" is the shrug of someone rejecting outside adjudication, especially the art world's tendency to launder difficult artists into brands. "Remain" is the key verb: he treats cruelty, impatience, and contrarianism not as flaws to outgrow but as tools to protect a way of seeing. "Mean little man" is self-deprecation with teeth. He takes the insult before anyone else can, then repurposes it as a badge: the willingness to be disliked becomes an ethical stance.

Context matters. Levine came up in a century when American art was wrestling with politics, money, and modernism; he stayed committed to figurative satire, skewering power with an almost journalistic bite. In that terrain, niceness is a kind of censorship. The quote telegraphs a lifelong suspicion of comfort: the fear that awards, patrons, and polite acclaim smooth down the sharp edges that let an artist notice hypocrisy and paint it without blinking.