Creativity Quote by Mark Mothersbaugh

Mothersbaugh’s offhand phrasing, "As far as the style", sounds like someone casually sorting through paint swatches, but that understatement is the point. It frames surrealism less as a lofty art-historical movement and more as a usable tool: a set of tricks for making the world feel slightly wrong in a way that snaps you awake. Coming from the co-founder of Devo and a composer whose work bounces between pop, punk, and commercial soundtracks, "fascinated" reads like an origin story for an aesthetic that thrives on collision: bright surfaces, weird angles, deadpan delivery, and a lurking sense that normal life is a costume.

The subtext is that surrealism isn’t escapism; it’s diagnosis. Devo’s whole project treated late-20th-century America as an uncanny machine - corporate language, consumer desire, and media repetition turned into choreography. Surrealism offered a vocabulary for that: juxtapositions that feel funny until they feel true, imagery that bypasses argument and hits the nervous system. Mothersbaugh doesn’t claim he was "influenced" or "inspired"; he was fascinated, like a tinkerer staring at a circuit board. That matters: it suggests intentional craft, not mysticism.

Contextually, surrealism also slots neatly into the post-60s art-school pipeline: musicians borrowing from visual art to build a total world, not just a sound. For Mothersbaugh, style isn’t decoration. It’s the delivery system for critique, smuggled in as play.