Art & Creativity Quote by Jim Dine

Western art runs less on lone genius than on crushes, rivalries, and chosen lineage. Jim Dine’s line is a neat sabotage of the museum myth: the idea that masterpieces arrive sealed off from other people, immaculate as a product shot. He swaps that for “biographical passion,” a phrase that makes influence feel bodily and messy. Not just studying a style, but wanting the person behind it - their bravado, their wounds, their permission to be strange.

Dine knows this from the inside. Coming out of postwar American art, he’s often filed beside Pop, yet his work is stubbornly personal: bathrobes as self-portraits, hearts as both emblem and confession. His own practice is saturated with attachment to earlier makers (you can hear the gravitational pull of Van Gogh, of German Expressionism, of handmade grit against slickness). So when he says Western art is built on one artist’s passion for another, it’s also a defense of sentiment in a culture that likes its aesthetics cool and its histories clean.

The subtext is political, too: “Western art” has long been narrated as a march of innovations. Dine reframes it as a chain of relationships, a relay of desire. Passion can mean admiration, envy, theft, devotion, even a need to outdo. That ambiguity is the point. It captures how artists build careers by building genealogies - name-checking, quoting, sampling, remaking - and how those acts are never neutral. They’re love letters with an edge, attempts to enter the biography of someone else and come out with a self.