Cauchikunst

Stephen Rowe snuck the framed skull in. There is also an intertemporal avant-garde group portrait upstairs in the Boardroom Gallery. The statement stuck up on the wall is:

Portrait of the intertemporal avant-garde artist (after Nietzsche)
My paintings are not serious: I have no ulterior motives regarding speculation. To succeed in making mankind ‘better’ is the last of my intentions. Naturally, I find knocking down idols much more amusing.

How is it that I am so shrewd? I have never stopped to reflect on problems that were not real problems, never wasted my time on such things. My ambition is to be completely sterile for others. Anyone who creates a following disgusts me.

Stupid

Artists are afraid. They whisper to each other about academics and curators who could prevent them from making their bits and pieces of rubbish. There is only one way to save yourselves, and that is to sacrifice your reputation.

The incredibly grotesque spectacle of enthusiasm for one’s nationality fills me with distaste, accompanied by nausea.

Needing nothing

Never work. Live for your pleasure. There is nothing to understand, nothing, nothing, nothing but the value that you yourself give to everything. The problem is that in this reject world all we have are specialists.

I do not remember ever having made an effort to obtain anything. I am the contrary of the heroic nature. ‘Wanting’ something, ‘aspiring’ to something, or having an ‘objective’ are all things totally outside of my experience. But that is how I have always lived. I have never had any ambitions. In fact, I can say that I have never been excessively preoccupied with men, women, or money.

Thus, the relations I maintain with people test my patience to the utmost. My ‘humanity’ does not consist in sympathising with my neighbours but in putting up with the fact of feeling them so close to me.

The anti-chameleon

Needless to say, I am not a chameleon. I have proved this by always choosing, instinctively, the atmosphere that would first change my skin. I do not take on the colour of my surroundings, however, but adopt one totally opposed to them. On the whole, I have always been the same; superficially, I have changed on many occasions, to become exactly the contrary of all that surrounded me.

I have always condemned myself to being different at every moment, to being beyond all conventions. The pressure I put on myself to avoid ever being assimilated by anybody or anything shows that I possess the instinctive, absolute certainty of what I need on any particular occasion. I enjoy all the good things – and even those little things that others are hardly capable of enjoying. And thus, out of my will to continual change, my will to live against the grain, I make my art.

When everything is meaningless, you might as well have some fun.