Odd Nerdrum Quotes
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When you choose your profession, you also choose your own downfall or success. If one chooses to become an artist it is 99% certain that it will go to hell. So you should not become that. If you study economics on Oslo, 99% of all students will do very well and 1% will reach the top.
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Kitsch is deep in its superficiality. Art is superficially deep.
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Everything is a meaningless struggle against nothing and when people say that the world has become a better place that is a false development-optimism. Nothing exists which ever becomes better. Everything stays the same. Somehow, there is nothing. That is so sad. Nothing to come to. Everything is an illusion. A very sweet illusion.
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We are all kitsch on our deathbeds.
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A topic is not interesting enough until it is multi layered. There is no vigor in a motive without many layers. One also learns quite a lot when one has been working on a difficult painting. That is my feeling. I believe that.
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The point is that only one thing matters in this world, to prepare oneself for death. One can try to be as comfortable as possible until one dies... Because being comfortable does not have any meaning either. It just does not. Everything is only a big meaninglessness that one must bear.
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I have always been astonished by hate. Revenge and hate. That is such strange human elements. I have seen a lot of that in my life. I am just as surprised each time. By revenge and hate.
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Because modernism has conquered art, kitsch is the savior of talent and devotion.
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If you fall asleep on horseback, the horse will stop by the rock. Art is a car. Kitsch is a horse.
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If a girl is in love with a poor guy and chooses him, then that is worst for her. If she chooses a rich man, it will be to her advantage. Everything will be fine.
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The world somehow is always the same. The only thing that can improve is the individual life. One can live a good life. One can give life a meaning. Either by drinking oneself to death or by painting oneself to death or by loving oneself to death.
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To be contemporary actually means to be an artist. [But] I do not feel contemporary in my work. I perceive my work as old-fashioned. It does not have a frame of actuality in our time or locality.
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One talks much more about the evil than about the good. That is a paradox. We should only talk about the good to lighten up our existence. Chase anxiousness/fear away for a moment before it sneaks back in again to our life.
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I had a choice. I could become an economist & managing director. I choose to do something else. I would have become much, much richer than I am. I choose to not do that. It's that simple.