Creativity Quote by Francis Picabia

Good taste, in Picabia's hands, isn’t a compliment - it’s a workout. The line lands like a sly eye-roll at the bourgeois demand that art (and people) behave properly. “Good company” sounds pleasant until you remember what it often means in practice: constant self-editing, politeness as performance, the quiet stress of not saying the wrong thing. Picabia’s punch is to yoke that social fatigue to “good taste,” treating aesthetic refinement not as an elevated sensibility but as another exhausting code you’re expected to obey.

The subtext is Dada-adjacent sabotage. Picabia moved through modernism like a gleeful arsonist, making and unmaking styles, flirting with abstraction, machine imagery, and provocation. In that world, “taste” isn’t neutral; it’s a gatekeeping mechanism that rewards continuity, legibility, and the kind of innovation that still flatters the collector’s living room. Calling it “tiring” reframes taste as labor done for someone else’s approval.

There’s also a delicious inversion: “good” becomes suspicious. The word is doing double duty, pointing to virtue while hinting at constraint. Picabia implies that the truly alive artistic posture might be bad taste, rude company, the energizing jolt of the improper. Not because vulgarity is inherently superior, but because exhaustion is a clue: when taste starts feeling like etiquette, you’re no longer sensing - you’re complying.