One doesn’t make art for other people, even though I am very concerned with the viewer.
Meaning of the quote
The quote suggests that artists create art for themselves, not to please others. Even though the artist cares about how people view and react to their art, the main purpose of creating art is to express the artist's own ideas and feelings. The artist makes art for themselves first, and then shares it with others, rather than making art specifically for the audience.
About Anish Kapoor
Anish Kapoor is a renowned British-Indian sculptor known for his innovative installation and conceptual art. From his iconic sculptures like Cloud Gate in Chicago to his work on the British passport, Kapoor has left an indelible mark on the art world, earning him numerous prestigious awards and honors over the years.
More quotes from Anish Kapoor
My work is not about my life history. It’s not about the story of my neurosis.
British contemporary artist
It’s precisely in those moments when I don’t know what to do, boredom drives one to try a host of possibilities to either get somewhere or not get anywhere.
British contemporary artist
One must not believe any of those mythologies about oneself as an artist.
British contemporary artist
What one does in the studio is to pose a series of problems to oneself. I’ve got to look for some deeper meaning, for some reason for this thing to be in the world. There’s enough stuff in the world.
British contemporary artist
Much of what I make is geometric, and has a kind of almost mathematical logic to the form.
British contemporary artist
It’s the role of the artist to pursue content.
British contemporary artist
I’m not an artist who has an agenda that’s set by the work.
British contemporary artist
Sculpture occupies the same space as your body.
British contemporary artist
I, in the end, make art for myself.
British contemporary artist
You know that day after day of, Oh God what am I going to do with myself feeling? The fear of the emptiness that it implies keeps me going.
British contemporary artist
Work grows out of other work, and there are very few eureka moments.
British contemporary artist
I think I understand something about space. I think the job of a sculptor is spatial as much as it is to do with form.
British contemporary artist
I’ve nothing to say.
British contemporary artist
There’s something imminent in the work, but the circle is only completed by the viewer.
British contemporary artist
We live in a fractured world. I’ve always seen it as my role as an artist to attempt to make wholeness.
British contemporary artist
My first show sold within the first 3 minutes, and I came back to the studio and spent the next two and a half years making almost nothing.
British contemporary artist
That freedom that Picasso afforded himself, to be an artist in a huge number of ways, seems to be a huge psychological liberation.
British contemporary artist
One does afford oneself the luxury to come into the studio and all day, every day, spend one’s life making aesthetic propositions. What an immense luxury.
British contemporary artist
All ideas grow out of other ideas.
British contemporary artist
If you get a bad review, you take that in your stride.
British contemporary artist
Red, of course, is the colour of the interior of our bodies. In a way it’s inside out, red.
British contemporary artist
I used to empty the studio out and throw stuff away. I now don’t. There will be a whole series of dead ends that a year or two down the line I’ll come back to.
British contemporary artist
What interests me is the sense of the darkness that we carry within us, the darkness that’s akin to one of the principal subjects of the sublime – terror.
British contemporary artist
A work will only have deep resonance if the kind of darkness I can generate is something that is resident in me already.
British contemporary artist
Being an artist is a very long game. It is not a 10-year game. I hope I’ll be around making art when I’m 80.
British contemporary artist
Content arises out of certain considerations about form, material, context-and that when that subject matter is sufficiently far away.
British contemporary artist
I feel there’s everything to do yet.
British contemporary artist
I’ve always felt that if one was going to take seriously this vocation as an artist, you have to get beyond that decorative facade.
British contemporary artist
The idea is that the object has a language unto itself.
British contemporary artist
Red is a colour I’ve felt very strongly about. Maybe red is a very Indian colour, maybe it’s one of those things that I grew up with and recognise at some other level.
British contemporary artist
Artists don’t make objects. Artists make mythologies.
British contemporary artist
Maybe the way we have learned to look has changed in the last 25 years, and the exotic is much more acceptable. There are many artists now, younger artists, who work out of the exotic.
British contemporary artist
The work itself has a complete circle of meaning and counterpoint. And without your involvement as a viewer, there is no story.
British contemporary artist
One cannot set out to make a work that’s spiritual. What is a contemporary iconography for the spiritual? Is it some fuzzy space?
British contemporary artist
I am Indian, and I’m proud of it. Indian life is mythologically rich and powerful.
British contemporary artist
Re-investing in one’s own little moments of insight is very important.
British contemporary artist
I feel the symbolic world is the nub of a problem for an artist.
British contemporary artist
One of the great currents in the contemporary experience of art is that it seems to come out of the experience of the author.
British contemporary artist
The eye is a very quick instrument, much quicker than the ear. The eye gets it immediately.
British contemporary artist
One can hardly be Indian and not know that almost every accent, which hand you eat your food with, has some deeper symbolic truth, reality.
British contemporary artist
One does not set out with the idea that I’ve just had a great idea and now I’m going to go and carry it out. Almost all art that’s made like that doesn’t go anywhere.
British contemporary artist
One doesn’t make art for other people, even though I am very concerned with the viewer.
British contemporary artist