Creativity Quote by Martin Kippenberger

Kippenberger is doing what he did best: turning the expectation of an “artist persona” into a joke that lands like an insult and a confession at the same time. “Assuming roles” points to the cultural demand that artists present a coherent brand - the tortured genius, the formal innovator, the political firebrand, the cool professional. He rejects it with a straight-faced shrug: it “won’t work for me,” not because he’s too authentic to perform, but because he’s too slippery to be cast.

The punchline is the contradiction. Claiming “I don’t have a style. None at all” is, in Kippenberger’s case, practically a style statement. It’s a provocation aimed at a market and a critical apparatus that reward recognizability: style as signature, as repeatable product, as proof of seriousness. By insisting on having “none,” he doesn’t escape the system so much as expose its terms. If style is what makes an artist legible, then illegibility becomes a strategy - a way to stay mobile, to keep the work from hardening into a logo.

Context matters: late 20th-century German art was negotiating postwar guilt, the rise of neo-expressionism, and the increasing globalization of the art economy. Kippenberger’s practice ricocheted across mediums and tones, mixing bravado with self-sabotage. The line reads as armor: a preemptive strike against critics trying to pin him down, and a refusal to let identity become a deadline. It’s wit as self-defense, and cynicism as creative freedom.