Art & Creativity Quote by Odd Nerdrum

Calling himself a "kitsch painter" is Nerdrum’s preemptive strike against the art-world immune system. "Kitsch" is the label modernism and its descendants use to quarantine the sentimental, the figurative, the legible - everything accused of pandering to easy feeling. By embracing the slur, he flips the hierarchy: if kitsch is what reliably moves people, maybe the problem is an art culture that treats being moved as a kind of embarrassment.

The line "working on human reactions" is deliberately unromantic, almost clinical. He’s not claiming transcendence; he’s claiming effect. That’s the provocation. Nerdrum positions painting less as formal innovation and more as emotional engineering - a return to older painterly ambitions (pathos, myth, drama, mortality) that contemporary institutions often file under "illustration" or "craft". The subtext is a critique of a professionalized avant-garde that can feel like it’s performing skepticism for insiders while outsourcing feeling to mass culture.

"I have found out that I am not alone" turns the manifesto into a populist wink. It acknowledges the quiet majority: viewers who want images that communicate, that risk beauty, that aren’t afraid of narrative or tenderness. Nerdrum’s context matters here: a Scandinavian painter who built a career in open conflict with modernist orthodoxies, styling himself as an atelier traditionalist in an era that prizes concept and irony. The quote works because it’s both confession and challenge: he admits he’s chasing reaction, then dares you to admit you want one.