"The artist is not responsible to any one. His social role is asocial... his only responsibility consists in an attitude to the work he does"
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Baselitz is picking a fight with the most common demand placed on artists: be useful, be exemplary, be legible, be on the right side of history. Calling the artist's social role "asocial" isn’t a plea for bohemian aloofness so much as a refusal of conscription. He’s defending art as a zone where the usual civic contracts don’t apply, where the work isn’t obligated to comfort, educate, represent, or redeem. That provocation lands harder because it comes from a postwar German painter whose career unfolded under the long shadow of propaganda, guilt, and a culture desperate to instrumentalize images again for moral bookkeeping.
The line is also a quiet repositioning of responsibility. Baselitz isn’t arguing that artists are irresponsible; he’s arguing that their accountability is internal, not public-facing. “An attitude to the work” suggests rigor, risk, and a kind of discipline that looks selfish from the outside. It’s the artist’s ethic, not the artist’s politics: the obligation to make something honest (or at least uncompromised) rather than something approved.
Subtext: this is a preemptive rebuttal to critics who want art to behave. Baselitz, famous for flipping figures upside down and for courting controversy, is essentially saying: don’t mistake offense for negligence. The work may disturb you precisely because it’s not trying to manage your reaction. In an era that increasingly grades culture on messaging, he insists on a different metric: whether the artist answered to the demands of the work, not the demands of the crowd.
The line is also a quiet repositioning of responsibility. Baselitz isn’t arguing that artists are irresponsible; he’s arguing that their accountability is internal, not public-facing. “An attitude to the work” suggests rigor, risk, and a kind of discipline that looks selfish from the outside. It’s the artist’s ethic, not the artist’s politics: the obligation to make something honest (or at least uncompromised) rather than something approved.
Subtext: this is a preemptive rebuttal to critics who want art to behave. Baselitz, famous for flipping figures upside down and for courting controversy, is essentially saying: don’t mistake offense for negligence. The work may disturb you precisely because it’s not trying to manage your reaction. In an era that increasingly grades culture on messaging, he insists on a different metric: whether the artist answered to the demands of the work, not the demands of the crowd.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
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