Art & Creativity Quote by Georg Baselitz

Baselitz’s line lands like a shrug that’s also a shove: the artist as someone who expects interrogation the moment he’s asked to narrate his own work. “Attacked” is deliberately disproportionate to the polite question it answers. That overreaction is the point. It frames interpretation not as curiosity but as a demand for justification, as if painting were on trial and the painter must produce a clean motive, a slogan, a moral.

The subtext is a refusal of the modern art world’s favorite transaction: image for explanation. Baselitz came up in postwar Germany, where art carried the extra burden of history, ideology, and public suspicion. He also built a career on provocation - raw figuration, ugly beauty, and the famous inverted paintings that short-circuit easy reading. In that context, being “asked about my painting” isn’t a neutral request; it’s the institutional voice of the critic, curator, journalist, or collector asking for the key that makes the work legible, fundable, and safely consumable.

The sentence works because it exposes a power dynamic. The questioner gets to define the terms (“What does it mean?” “What are you saying?”), and the artist is pushed into becoming a spokesperson for his own images, even though painting often operates in the opposite direction: ambiguity, accident, sensation, decisions you can’t translate without flattening them. Baselitz weaponizes sensitivity to defend a stubborn idea of painting as an experience first, a thesis never. In three seconds, he turns a Q&A into a critique of the entire interpretive economy around contemporary art.