Creativity Quote by Boyd Rice

The line lands like a shrug that’s doing more work than it admits. “I think I feel” is hesitant, almost self-correcting: Rice frames the sentiment as an instinct he’s observing in himself, not a claim he’s willing to defend. Then he slips in “automatically,” a word that makes belonging sound involuntary, even engineered. Home isn’t earned through language, relationships, or time; it’s triggered, like a reflex.

For an artist like Boyd Rice, whose career has long traded in provocation, posture, and cultivated unease, that casual naturalization matters. Saying Italy feels like home can be read as pure aesthetic alignment: the country as a living museum of surfaces, styles, and decadence, a place where “taste” is a social currency and history flatters the present. But the subtext also invites suspicion. “At home” is one of those phrases that can mean comfort, or it can mean permission. It can signal a desire to be absorbed by an old-world aura that cleans up a persona, lending it heritage and gravity it didn’t have to build.

Italy functions here as shorthand for a certain romance of Europe: Catholic theatricality, classical continuity, the seductive idea of civilization as ambience. The sentence is small, but it performs a larger move common in art-world self-mythology: relocating identity from biography to geography, as if the right backdrop can make a person inevitable. It’s not just about liking a place; it’s about claiming that the place likes you back, on sight.