Wit & Attitude Quote by Jenny Holzer

Holzer’s line lands like a compliment with a switchblade in it: she grants romance its cinematic glow, then punctures it with an almost parental eye-roll. “Beautiful” isn’t revoked; it’s indicted. The phrase understands exactly why self-sacrifice narratives seduce us - they produce instant meaning, a clean storyline, a body offered up as proof. But Holzer’s second clause, “but stupid,” drags that elegance back into the real world where consequences exist, where dying doesn’t magically resolve anything, and where devotion can be less pure feeling than social script.

The intent feels less anti-love than anti-ideology. “Expiring” is an old-fashioned, euphemistic verb, the kind you’d find in melodrama or Victorian tragedy; it turns death into a tasteful fade-out. Holzer chooses it to expose how language prettifies ruin. Then she collapses the aesthetic spell with a blunt, almost embarrassing word: “stupid.” Not immoral. Not tragic. Stupid. That’s the point: she refuses to let grand emotion launder bad decisions into nobility.

Context matters because Holzer’s practice lives in public text - truisms on LEDs, posters, billboards - slogans that mimic authority while undermining it. This reads like a counterfeit proverb, the kind culture repeats until it becomes policy, especially for women trained to confuse being desired with being depleted. Holzer offers a colder mercy: love doesn’t need a corpse to be real. If it demands one, it’s not romance; it’s a power arrangement with better lighting.