Creativity Quote by Jasper Johns

Instruction disguised as shrug: a workflow reduced to muscle memory. Jasper Johns' line, "Do something, do something to that, and then do something to that", sounds like a non-answer until you hear the studio logic clicking underneath it. It's not a manifesto about inspiration; it's a recipe for staying in motion when big ideas dry up. Johns came up in the wake of Abstract Expressionism, when painters were expected to deliver heroic sincerity on command. His early move was to treat the artwork less like a confession and more like a procedure: take a thing (a flag, a target, a number), work on it, let the working generate the next problem.

The repetition is the point. "Do something" refuses the grand, romantic verb; it replaces genius with sequence. Each "that" is both specific and evasive: it could be an object, an image, a surface, a mistake. The line also telegraphs Johns' comfort with mediation - the idea that art is often about secondhand images and second-order actions. You begin with something already loaded with meaning, then you change it, then you change the change. Authorship becomes less about originating content than about deciding what to do next.

Subtextually, it's a defense against paralysis and a jab at the demand for originality. If the modern artist is pressured to invent ex nihilo, Johns offers a cooler proposition: make a chain of decisions, and meaning will accrete in the edits. The intent isn't to drain art of feeling; it's to relocate feeling into attention, persistence, and the visible record of thought.