Marlene Dumas

The Wrong Questions

If you ask the wrong questions
you can’t get the right answers.

I don’t have no fin-de-siècle desperation.
I don’t like to ‘take a stand’.
I’d rather fly and create distance
because that is what the intellect does and should do.

Art doesn’t point fingers or serve ‘the good’.
Art is and should stay as AMORAL as possible.

Artists should (re)consider their AESTHETIC consciousness;
their ETHICAL consciousness is mostly not that interesting
at all – if not a drawback.

Art partakes in Evil and whatever Beauty sees.


The wrong Questions. First published in The Intellectual Concience of Art /  Lier & Boog. Series of Philosophy of Art and Art Theory, vol 11, 1996, p.28 ; and included in Marlene Dumas, Sweet Nothings. Notes and Texts, first edition Galerie Paul Andriesse and De Balie Publishers Amsterdam, 1998; and second edition (revised and expanded) Koenig Books London, 2014 [written in reaction to a request by Annette W. Balkema and Henk Slager, editors of Lier & Boog].