Creativity Quote by Francis Picabia

Pain gets drafted into meaning; pleasure just shows up, shrugs, and leaves no forwarding address. Picabia’s line has the clean, knife-edge perversity of the avant-garde: it refuses the comforting idea that feeling automatically equals truth. Pain, he suggests, is narrative-friendly. It demands explanation, recruits philosophy, religion, medicine, morality. We build entire cultures around justifying it, dignifying it, turning it into a plot with a point. Pleasure, by contrast, is “totally indifferent” not because it’s trivial, but because it doesn’t need to be useful. It doesn’t argue its case. It doesn’t care what you learn.

That contrast carries a distinctly Dadaist contempt for solemnity. Picabia came up through early modernism and then helped torch its pieties. After World War I, Europe was swimming in grand narratives that had produced mechanized slaughter; suspicion toward “reasons” wasn’t an intellectual parlor game, it was a survival instinct. By calling pain reasonable, he also hints at how easily institutions weaponize it: suffering becomes proof of character, payment for sin, fuel for nationalism, a permission slip for cruelty.

The real bite is the reversal of our usual moral hierarchy. We want pleasure to validate us and pain to be meaningless. Picabia flips it: pain is the one that gets domesticated into a lesson; pleasure remains anarchic, unassimilated. In an art world obsessed with statements, it’s also a sly manifesto: stop forcing experience to testify. Let pleasure be purposeless. Let pain’s “reasons” be suspect.