Art & Creativity Quote by Martin Kippenberger

Kippenberger’s line lands like a shrug with teeth: entertainment isn’t the point of art, but it’s inseparable from how art works on us. “Like color in pictures” is a sly demotion. Color can be essential, seductive, even structural, yet it’s also the first thing the untrained eye grabs. By yoking entertainment to color, Kippenberger needles the idea that pleasure is somehow a vulgar add-on, while also warning how easily pleasure becomes the whole story.

The intent feels double-edged in a way that fits his persona and moment. Kippenberger came up in postwar German art when seriousness carried moral weight and “authenticity” was a kind of currency. His practice trafficked in jokes, bad taste, quotations, and intentional overproduction, as if to say: you want purity? Watch me contaminate it. In that context, “entertainment” reads less like a concession to mass culture than a critique of art-world piety. Museums and critics pretend to be above spectacle while building entire economies on it.

The subtext is also about power. Entertainment is the entry point, the lure that gets bodies into rooms and eyes onto surfaces. Color sells; so does humor, scandal, story. Kippenberger isn’t apologizing for that. He’s pointing out that the moral panic over “too entertaining” usually masks a fear of losing gatekeeping control. If art can be funny, immediately legible, even enjoyable, then it can slip free of the priesthood that polices meaning.