Wealth & Money Quote by Odd Nerdrum

Nerdrum is offering encouragement, but it lands less like a motivational poster and more like a quiet rebuttal to the art world’s scoreboard. When he tells young painters to “just continue painting no matter what,” he’s smuggling in a premise: persistence is not merely a work ethic, it’s a form of refusal. Refusal of trends, of institutional taste, of the market’s demand that art justify itself in metrics.

The sentence “it’s not about success or money” functions as a rhetorical cleansing. Nerdrum isn’t naive about money; he’s drawing a boundary around what can and can’t be allowed to steer the hand. Coming from a painter whose career has been defined by friction with contemporary art orthodoxy and an insistence on craft and figuration, the line reads as autobiographical advice disguised as principle. “Following the path you believe in” isn’t generic self-help; it’s a coded defense of conviction as an aesthetic stance.

The subtext is that young artists are being trained to optimize: for attention, for grants, for the right discourse, for social media velocity. Nerdrum counters with something older and harsher: you may never get permission, you may never be fashionable, and the work still has to happen. His phrasing keeps it plain, almost stubbornly un-theoretical, which is itself the point. It shifts the center of gravity from external validation to an internal compass, implying that the real failure isn’t obscurity but abandoning the work to chase a version of “success” someone else defined.