Creativity Quote by Martin Kippenberger

Kippenberger’s joke lands like a dare: stop demanding that artists bleed on schedule. “I can’t cut off an ear everyday” raids the Van Gogh myth - the holy image of the creator as martyr - and treats it as a ridiculous KPI. The line isn’t anti-Van Gogh so much as anti-audience: a jab at the cultural appetite for dramatic suffering as proof of seriousness. If the artist isn’t visibly unraveling, are they even working?

Then he widens the target: “Do the Van Gogh here and the Mozart there.” Genius becomes a menu of branded poses, a set of costumes you can try on to satisfy curators, critics, and the market’s hunger for legible narratives. Kippenberger, who made a career out of slippery, self-sabotaging provocations, is mocking the way art history gets flattened into shorthand. Van Gogh equals pain. Mozart equals effortless prodigy. The contemporary artist is expected to cosplay both, sometimes in the same season.

The slyest turn is the complaint about “always having to check up on what one is really doing.” It’s both a parody of solemn artistic self-interrogation and a confession about it. The demand for authenticity becomes another form of labor, another surveillance regime: not just making work, but constantly auditing your motives to keep them pure enough for public consumption. In Kippenberger’s world, that moral bookkeeping is the real exhaustion - and the punchline is that even cynicism can’t fully escape it.