Art & Creativity Quote by Leonard Baskin

Baskin pushes back against a lazy diagnosis of modern art as proudly, programmatically empty. The first sentence concedes the obvious: contemporary works do, in some way, extend a larger cultural condition (the “that” reads like alienation, fragmentation, maybe the postwar sense that big systems and big meanings have rotted). He’s not denying the darkness. He’s denying the cartoon version of the artist: the trench-coated nihilist, smirking at the ruins, making meaninglessness into a brand.

The phrase “further expression” is doing quiet, strategic work. It frames art less as the cause of cultural malaise than as one of its symptoms, a seismograph rather than an arsonist. Then he sharpens the distinction with “active, ongoing” and “self-consciousness.” That’s a triple hedge against the idea that artists wake up each morning determined to produce despair. For Baskin, nihilism in art is more likely ambient than intentional: it seeps in through materials, institutions, politics, and the weather of the era, not through a manifesto.

Context matters: Baskin was a fiercely moral figurative artist who distrusted fashionable abstraction and what he saw as the art world’s cynicism. Coming out of mid-century trauma and into late-century theory-saturation, he’s insisting on a difference between depicting a world that feels stripped of meaning and personally endorsing the stripping. Subtext: critics and audiences often project their own exhaustion onto art, mistaking an honest report for an ideological celebration. Baskin defends the artist’s interior life as messier, more conflicted, and, crucially, still capable of belief.