Creativity Quote by Ad Reinhardt

Ad Reinhardt, the austere painter and polemicist of mid-century New York, stripped painting down to nothing but painting itself. For him, an idea was often a slogan, a sales pitch, a pretext borrowed from outside the canvas. Saying that only a bad artist thinks he has a good idea is a jab at complacency and concept-worship. The artist who congratulates himself on a clever notion mistakes novelty for necessity. The feeling of having a good idea becomes a crutch, an alibi for weak seeing and weaker making.

A good artist does not need anything because art, at its strongest, is self-sufficient. It does not need a story, message, subject matter, style gimmick, audience approval, or even the artist’s assertion of intention. Reinhardt’s famous dictum, art-as-art is art, rejects the props of utility and meaning that arrive from outside. The statement also turns against ego. The good artist does not need the comfort of thinking, I have it. He needs discipline, patience, and the nerve to remove everything unnecessary. That ascetic posture, sharpened by Reinhardt’s interest in Zen and by his taste for negative definitions, leads to the silence and self-containment of his late black paintings.

Standing before one of those panels, you find almost nothing to grasp: no image, no narrative, barely even color. And yet the longer the eye stays, the more the painting discloses subtle structure and luminosity. Such work cannot be carried by a bright idea; it demands a long apprenticeship in unlearning. Reinhardt’s satirical rules for a new academy, with their relentless no to texture, brushwork, and subject, make the same point. Art is not a delivery system for ideas; it is a mode of attention. The bad artist needs a premise to lean on. The good one is free of needs and lets the work stand, without excuses, as nothing but itself.