Creativity Quote by Ben Nicholson

Mythology, in Ben Nicholson's telling, isn’t marble serenity; it’s a messy spreadsheet of favors, bloodlines, and bad behavior. The punchline sits in the rapid-fire cataloging: “indebted,” “related,” “screwed,” “uncle or grandmother.” He drags the pantheon off its pedestal and into the realm of petty obligations and scandalous genealogies, the very stuff that makes any “divine order” feel suspiciously human. It’s funny because it’s blunt, but it’s also diagnostic: Nicholson is treating the gods less like objects of reverence than like a social system you can diagram, the way you’d map patrons, rivals, and influences in an art world.

As an artist associated with abstraction, Nicholson’s interest in “organization” reads like a quiet self-portrait. He’s not confessing belief; he’s confessing method. Even when the subject is myth, his attention goes to structure: who connects to whom, what power flows where, what hidden transaction explains the surface story. The bawdy phrasing isn’t just shock value; it’s an insistence that behind grand narratives are bodies, appetites, and consequences.

Context matters: early-to-mid 20th century modernism often raided ancient sources while stripping them of piety, recasting them as formal problems or cultural raw material. Nicholson’s quote catches that modernist move in real time. The pantheon becomes less a heaven and more a network map - and the joke is that “divinity” is just politics with better branding.