Creativity Quote by Georg Baselitz

Baselitz is basically picking a fight with the modern world’s favorite superpower: the copy. “I don’t like things that can be reproduced” isn’t nostalgia for handcraft so much as a refusal of the clean, infinite scalability that turns art into content and objects into product lines. He’s drawing a line between an artwork that exists as a stubborn fact in the room and an image that can be endlessly circulated, resized, merchandised, and diluted without consequence.

Wood matters here because it’s an argument made of grain. The medium won’t behave like a screen or a print run; it splits, knots, resists, and announces its history. When Baselitz says wood “isn’t important in itself,” he’s rejecting the romantic mystique of materials. What he wants is what wood forces: singularity. Not “limited edition” scarcity engineered by the market, but actual difference - the kind that can’t be smoothed out by a template.

“Unique, simple, unpretentious” sounds like modesty, but it’s also a critique of art-world sheen. Baselitz, a postwar German painter known for turning figures upside down, has always been suspicious of polished meaning. A wood object doesn’t need conceptual fireworks to justify itself; it sits there, rough-edged, insisting on presence. Subtext: authenticity isn’t a vibe, it’s a condition of making. In an economy that rewards frictionless reproduction, he’s staking value on what can’t be perfectly repeated - and on the quiet authority of things that don’t beg to be shared.