Salvador Dalí: The High Priest of the Absurd

Salvador Dalí didn’t just paint dreams; he lived inside one. A meticulous craftsman and relentless self-mythologizer, he turned daily life into a surreal performance.

• He reportedly took “micro-naps” by holding a key or spoon over a metal plate, waking at the clink—an attempt to harvest the razor’s edge between sleep and waking for ideas.
• Dalí once gave a lecture while sealed in a deep-sea diving suit and nearly suffocated on stage before assistants wrestled off the helmet.
• He strolled a leashed anteater through Paris and kept an ocelot named Babou, which he brought to chic restaurants.
• He turned a lobster into a telephone and wore a loaf of bread as a hat at a press conference, because ideas, he said, should be “consumed.”

“I don’t do drugs. I am drugs.” —attributed to Dalí

Marcel Duchamp: The Chess Player Who Outsmarted Art

Duchamp turned the art world upside down by insisting that ideas could be art—and then made a sport of disappearing.

• His most infamous work, a urinal signed “R. Mutt,” wasn’t “made” so much as selected—a readymade that redefined authorship.
• He adopted a female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy, and posed for photographs as her, punning on “Eros, c’est la vie.”
• He once installed a door that could only close one of two rooms at a time—architecture as a conceptual prank.
• He all but quit the art scene to devote himself to chess, competing internationally and designing problem sets.

Yayoi Kusama: The Polka-Dotted Universe

Kusama transformed obsession into cosmos. Since childhood, she has reported vivid hallucinations—fields of dots and nets—that became the engine of her art.

• She has voluntarily lived in a psychiatric hospital in Tokyo for decades, commuting daily to her studio.
• Her Infinity Mirror Rooms are engineered to swallow viewers in seemingly endless constellations.
• In the 1960s, she staged street “happenings,” painting polka dots on participants and props to dissolve boundaries between self and world.
• She is also a prolific poet and novelist, channeling the same obsessiveness into language.

Joseph Beuys: Felt, Fat, and the American Coyote

Few artists blurred myth and biography like Beuys. He turned ordinary materials into potent symbols of healing and memory.

• He often wore a felt hat and used felt and animal fat as sculptural materials, charging them with metaphorical warmth and protection.
• His performance “I Like America and America Likes Me” involved spending days in a New York gallery with a live coyote, wrapped in felt and ferried by ambulance to avoid “touching” the city.
• He told a dramatic story of being rescued in wartime by nomads who wrapped him in fat and felt—an origin myth debated by historians but central to his art’s symbolism.

Chris Burden: Risk as Medium

Burden’s early works probed the edges of danger, control, and trust—shocking precisely because they were real.

• In “Shoot” (1971), he had a friend fire a bullet that grazed his arm—a brief, alarming act that became an enduring image of performance art’s extremes.
• He once confined himself inside a locker for five days with only water in the top locker and an empty bottle below.
• In “Trans-fixed” (1974), he was briefly nailed through the hands to a Volkswagen Beetle like a roadside crucifixion.

Piero Manzoni: When a Can Became a Concept

In 1961, Manzoni sealed 90 tins labeled “Artist’s Shit” and priced them by the weight of gold at the time—a sly market satire that later became, ironically, very valuable.

• He also sold balloons as “Artist’s Breath,” turning exhalation into a collectible relic.
• With “Socle du Monde,” he designated the entire planet a sculpture by simply providing a base and a title.

Francis Bacon: The Controlled Catastrophe of a Studio

Bacon’s studio looked like a tornado of paint rags, dust, and photographs—but he mined this chaos methodically.

• He worked from photographs and film stills rather than live models, using distortion to amplify psychological intensity.
• Conservators later cataloged thousands of items from his studio, including dust and debris he deliberately folded into paint for texture.

Caravaggio: Baroque Outlaw

Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro was matched only by the shadows of his biography.

• He killed a man after a dispute and fled Rome, working under death sentence in absentia.
• In a harrowing self-portrait, he used his own features for the severed head of Goliath.
• He often painted saints and Madonnas using ordinary people as models, collapsing the sacred and the street.

Hieronymus Bosch: Renaissance of the Weird

Bosch filled his panels with hybrid beasts, musical instruments, and moral allegories so strange that some details still baffle viewers.

• In one famous panel, musical notation appears on a figure’s backside—an Easter egg transcribed centuries later by an amused modern musician.
• Almost nothing is known about his personality, leaving the wildness of his imagery to stand in for a lost biography.

Andy Warhol: The Machine with Human Archives

Warhol cultivated a robotic persona but never stopped collecting the everyday.

• He famously maintained hundreds of “Time Capsules,” boxing up everyday ephemera that later became a sprawling portrait of late-20th-century life.
• He recorded casual phone calls and conversations, fascinated by the flat hum of social chatter.
• After surviving a shooting in 1968, he wore support garments under his clothes; the vulnerability only amplified his cool exterior.

Marina Abramović: The Body as a Border

Abramović treats endurance as sculpture, time as raw material.

• In “Rhythm 0,” she placed 72 objects—including a loaded gun—on a table and let the audience use them on her. The work became a chilling study in crowd psychology.
• In “The Artist Is Present,” she sat silently across from visitors for over 700 hours, turning eye contact into a transformative encounter.

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Bebop on Canvas

Basquiat fused street idiom and fine art with the syncopation of jazz.

• Before the galleries, he left cryptic aphorisms around lower Manhattan as “SAMO.”
• He often painted in Armani suits, then wore the paint-splattered clothing out, collapsing studio and street.
• His work riffs on anatomy diagrams, boxing, bebop legends, and colonial histories in urgent, looping hand.

Leonora Carrington: Alchemy, Hyenas, and Escape

Carrington’s life threaded through myth, exile, and resistance.

• After a breakdown during World War II, she later wrote a memoir, “Down Below,” braiding trauma with visionary experience.
• Her paintings teem with alchemical kitchens, midnight banquets, and hybrid familiars—worlds built from personal lore rather than borrowed symbols.
• She cooked up actual recipes derived from her own surreal imagination, treating cuisine as another ritual space.

Banksy: Anonymity as Performance

Banksy’s greatest work may be his vanishing act.

• He once hung his own art in museums without permission, blending it seamlessly into the collections until discovered.
• At auction, one of his best-known images self-shredded just after the gavel fell—instantly transforming into a new work.
• He has staged shows with live, controversial set pieces, questioning spectacle, ethics, and complicity.

Stelarc and ORLAN: Rewriting the Body

Where others painted on canvas, these artists treated the body as both medium and message.

• Stelarc has staged suspensions and later had a prosthetic ear surgically implanted onto his arm, exploring the posthuman.
• ORLAN underwent a series of plastic surgeries as performance, reconfiguring her face along art-historical “ideals” to expose how culture scripts beauty.

Maurizio Cattelan: Prankster-Philosopher

Cattelan delights—and infuriates—by pushing satire to the breaking point.

• He duct-taped a banana to a wall as “Comedian,” spotlighting value, spectacle, and appetite in the art market.
• He created a fully functional 18-karat gold toilet titled “America,” daring visitors to confront luxury and waste simultaneously.
• In a notorious early gesture, he even duct-taped his gallerist to a wall, blurring collaboration and captivity.

Kurt Schwitters: The Cathedral of Junk

Long before upcycling was a buzzword, Schwitters built a private cosmos from trash.

• His “Merz” collages folded tram tickets, newspaper scraps, and buttons into delicate constructions.
• He transformed parts of his home into the “Merzbau,” a walk-in sculpture that kept metastasizing—an artwork you could live inside.
• Destroyed in war, the idea lived on as he rebuilt fragments elsewhere, including a “Merz Barn” in the English countryside.

Why Eccentricity Matters

Eccentric artists do more than entertain with antics. Their oddness operates like a pry bar on what we call “normal”—dislodging clichés, policies, markets, even moral reflexes. They show that creativity thrives not by trimming the weird edges but by sharpening them. Whether through a polka-dotted infinity or a canned provocation, eccentricity reframes reality just enough for us to see it again, newly strange—and newly possible.