Creativity Quote by Jasper Johns

Johns is describing a kind of artistic ego-death that sounds paradoxical until you remember how thoroughly the art world trains you to perform “artist” rather than make art. “Give up everything” isn’t the romantic starving-in-a-loft cliché; it’s a demand to surrender the scaffolding that props up your taste, your habits, your precious idea of what counts as “good.” The sting is in the clause that follows: even the desire to be a good artist has to go. Not because excellence is irrelevant, but because the craving for it is a contaminant. It makes you strategize, polish, signal seriousness, anticipate reviews. It nudges you toward the already-legible.

That’s Johns speaking from inside the postwar American shift away from heroic self-expression and toward cooler, procedural, object-like art. His own breakthrough works (flags, targets, numbers) weren’t virtuoso displays of personal feeling; they were blunt symbols treated with uncanny attention. Their power comes from refusing the usual narrators of value: originality as spectacle, sincerity as proof. Wanting to be “good” often means wanting to be recognized as good, and recognition is a style all its own.

The subtext is almost moral: integrity requires a willingness to look foolish, repetitive, minor, even wrong. Johns isn’t arguing for indifference; he’s arguing for freedom. When the internal critic stops auditioning for approval, the artist can finally hear what the work itself is asking for, not what the market, the canon, or the mirror wants back.