Creativity Quote by Martin Kippenberger

Kippenberger’s line lands like a wink delivered with a straight face: the artist most famous for needling the art world insists he’s just here to soothe. The comedy is doing real work. By framing “provocation” as someone else’s misreading, he shifts the spotlight from his abrasiveness to the audience’s appetite for scandal. It’s a neat reversal: if you’re offended, that’s your hunger talking, not his cruelty.

The phrasing is carefully disarming. “Not interested” signals fatigue with the moral theater that surrounds contemporary art, where outrage becomes a metric of relevance. “Only” narrows the claim into a stubborn little sanctuary: consolation as the true purpose, not a bonus. Yet coming from Kippenberger, consolation can’t mean comfort in the Hallmark sense. It’s consolation in the bar-stool, gallows-humor register: the relief of being allowed to admit that the whole system - prestige, taste, money, earnestness - is ridiculous and still unavoidable.

Context matters. Kippenberger worked in a late-20th-century German art scene haunted by history and allergic to grand statements, while the international market was turning artists into brands. His persona - prolific, performative, publicly messy - was often treated as the content. This quote reads like a defensive joke and a manifesto: don’t confuse the slap with the intention. He’s offering consolation to anyone trapped in the same room: the viewer, the artist, the institution, all complicit, all pretending otherwise. The tenderness is real; it just arrives wearing brass knuckles.