Creativity Quote by Martin Kippenberger

Reputation is the last medium Kippenberger can’t paint over. The line reads like a shrug, but it’s a dare: you can ignore the work now, misunderstand it, hate the artist, love the scandal - time will curate the whole mess into a verdict anyway. The sly twist sits in the aside, “or maybe not say,” which admits the cruelest possibility for any artist isn’t bad press, it’s silence. He frames posterity as both courtroom and void, with the punchline that the sentence will be delivered after he’s no longer around to argue, charm, or sabotage it.

Kippenberger built a career out of provocation, self-mythology, and a kind of reckless productivity that treated seriousness as something you could smuggle inside a joke. In that light, the quote is less a confession than a strategic repositioning: if the art world is addicted to talk - reviews, gossip, reputation economics - then the “only thing that finally counts” is the narrative that survives the body. He’s not claiming moral redemption; he’s acknowledging the machinery. Artists don’t just make objects, they generate commentary, and commentary becomes a second oeuvre.

There’s also a bleak tenderness here. The word “finally” concedes exhaustion: all the posing and posturing is temporary, but the afterimage is permanent. He anticipates the posthumous Kippenberger as a public construct, assembled from whatever people need him to be: genius, clown, villain, cautionary tale. The quote works because it stages that loss of control as both punchline and prophecy.