"One has complexes. One has the art complex. One goes to the School of Fine Arts and catches the complexes"
About this Quote
“Catches” is the tell: Tinguely frames artistic ambition not as a calling but as a contagion. In three clipped, deadpan sentences, he turns the high seriousness of art education into something you pick up in a hallway like a cold. The repetition of “One has…” does more than sound aphoristic; it anonymizes the speaker into a generic specimen, implying this isn’t a personal confession so much as a diagnosis of a type the art world keeps producing.
The target is the “art complex” - that cocktail of insecurity, status hunger, and overidentification with the label “artist.” By calling it a complex, he borrows the language of psychoanalysis and pathology, suggesting that what passes for refined selfhood in the academy is often a set of compensations: needing permission, needing prestige, needing to be seen as profound. The School of Fine Arts becomes less a workshop than an incubator, a place where anxieties are standardized, shared, and rewarded.
Context matters: Tinguely, a central figure in kinetic sculpture and Nouveau Realisme, built machines that mocked permanence and the museum’s reverence. His work often performed failure, noise, and excess - a rebuttal to the polished, eternal object. That sensibility runs through this line. It’s not anti-learning; it’s anti-piety. He’s puncturing the idea that institutional validation is synonymous with artistic vitality, warning that schools can teach you technique while quietly infecting you with the need to “be an artist” rather than make art.
The target is the “art complex” - that cocktail of insecurity, status hunger, and overidentification with the label “artist.” By calling it a complex, he borrows the language of psychoanalysis and pathology, suggesting that what passes for refined selfhood in the academy is often a set of compensations: needing permission, needing prestige, needing to be seen as profound. The School of Fine Arts becomes less a workshop than an incubator, a place where anxieties are standardized, shared, and rewarded.
Context matters: Tinguely, a central figure in kinetic sculpture and Nouveau Realisme, built machines that mocked permanence and the museum’s reverence. His work often performed failure, noise, and excess - a rebuttal to the polished, eternal object. That sensibility runs through this line. It’s not anti-learning; it’s anti-piety. He’s puncturing the idea that institutional validation is synonymous with artistic vitality, warning that schools can teach you technique while quietly infecting you with the need to “be an artist” rather than make art.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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