Parenting & Family Quote by Jasper Johns

Johns frames “artist” not as a calling discovered early, but as a word that arrived late, almost like a foreign passport. The blunt repetition - “there were no artists and there was no art” - isn’t romantic deprivation; it’s a description of a social world where the category simply doesn’t exist. In that kind of environment, you don’t lack inspiration so much as you lack permission, models, and vocabulary. Art isn’t absent as an activity (people still make things), it’s absent as an identity you can plausibly inhabit.

The sly power of the quote is how Johns admits his first understanding of art was logistical, not aesthetic: “I thought it meant… a situation different than the one that I was in.” “Artist” becomes a mechanism for escape, a way out of a fixed life-script, rather than a declaration of inner genius. That’s a quietly subversive origin story for someone who would later make a career out of questioning what counts as art in the first place - flags, targets, numbers, ordinary symbols turned into high-stakes objects. If you grow up where art has no local referent, you’re primed to treat art as a problem of context: who gets to name it, where it’s allowed to appear, what changes when it enters a different room.

There’s also a refusal of sentimentality here. Johns doesn’t mythologize a lonely childhood vision; he emphasizes contingency. Becoming an artist wasn’t destiny. It was relocation - social, cultural, and psychic - into a “different situation,” and that practical shift is the seed of his later conceptual coolness.