Creativity Quote by Matthew Barney

Matthew Barney’s praise of Jackass is a neat act of cultural judo: he drags a frat-boy stunt reel into the museum by treating it like a serious inquiry into physics and flesh. The key move is “tradition of physical comedy.” He’s not defending the movie’s taste; he’s reframing its vulgarity as lineage. Buster Keaton, slapstick, vaudeville - bodies negotiating a world that refuses to cooperate. Jackass becomes less “look at these idiots” and more “watch a body meet the limits of matter.”

The real tell is gravity. Barney, whose work obsessively scripts bodily constraint, endurance, and transformation, hears in Jackass a blunt, democratic version of his own themes. Gravity is the ultimate curator: it edits the human figure, humiliates it, and makes an abstract law visible in bruises. That’s why this works as criticism and confession. He’s admitting an attraction to art that can’t hide behind metaphor. The body falls, the body swells, the body fails; you can’t talk your way out of impact.

There’s also a sly leveling here. By elevating a mainstream gross-out phenomenon, Barney needles the prestige economy that insists “high” art is where complex ideas live. Jackass doesn’t need theory to stage a primal drama: the human desire to test boundaries, and the comic inevitability of consequence. Gravity is the punchline and the judge.