Atlantica - 01.06.2001, Side 21

A T L A N T I C A 19
art, it’s forbidden to make a masterpiece. In
kitsch, the masterpiece and talent is the
most important thing you can have.
But what about all the masterpieces in the
past? Were they not art?
They had another way of judgement then.
Just like you judge movies today, they
judged pictures. Painting should be like
football. Football has rules. So does kitsch.
Art is not about rules or about being clever.
It’s about thinking right. From the last part
of the seventeenth century to today, art
has effectively ruined painting. Painting is
not good for art. Art is a sort of science. It
has nothing to do with talent, and in the
old days, art was a discipline. Modern art
goes more and more back to science. If
you want to succeed as an artist, you have
to give up on your talent.
So art should not imitate life?
Kant said that if a painting is too alive, it's
not art anymore.
But yet you have so many symbols in your
work, are the images mythological?
No, they are all from my own mind. My
paintings tell a story. Here for example
(Nerdrum points to a painting of a small
child sitting with crossed legs in a forest,
pointing at something) is a picture of
myself as a child. I am pointing as if say-
ing, "I know exactly what I should tell
them." (He laughs.)
Your images, your paintings look as if they
are from a past era.
That is because I don't look forward. When
you look forward ten or twenty years, you
are modern. But I look ten or twenty thou-
sand years forward, to a time which is not
modern anymore. In a certain way, I am
looking at eternity. I always keep that in my
mind, an eternal time somewhere in the
distant future, where nothing matters any-
more. He who has seen a glimpse of eter-
"If you want to succeed as
an artist, you have to give up
on your talent."
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