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 about the author

More quotes from Anish Kapoor

My work is not about my life history. It’s not about the story of my neurosis.

Anish Kapoor

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.

Anish Kapoor

British contemporary artist

One must not believe any of those mythologies about oneself as an artist.

Anish Kapoor

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.

Anish Kapoor

British contemporary artist

Much of what I make is geometric, and has a kind of almost mathematical logic to the form.

Anish Kapoor

British contemporary artist

It’s the role of the artist to pursue content.

Anish Kapoor

British contemporary artist

I’m not an artist who has an agenda that’s set by the work.

Anish Kapoor

British contemporary artist

Sculpture occupies the same space as your body.

Anish Kapoor

British contemporary artist

I, in the end, make art for myself.

Anish Kapoor

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.

Anish Kapoor

British contemporary artist

Work grows out of other work, and there are very few eureka moments.

Anish Kapoor

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.

Anish Kapoor

British contemporary artist

I’ve nothing to say.

Anish Kapoor

British contemporary artist

There’s something imminent in the work, but the circle is only completed by the viewer.

Anish Kapoor

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.

Anish Kapoor

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.

Anish Kapoor

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.

Anish Kapoor

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.

Anish Kapoor

British contemporary artist

All ideas grow out of other ideas.

Anish Kapoor

British contemporary artist

If you get a bad review, you take that in your stride.

Anish Kapoor

British contemporary artist

Red, of course, is the colour of the interior of our bodies. In a way it’s inside out, red.

Anish Kapoor

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.

Anish Kapoor

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.

Anish Kapoor

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.

Anish Kapoor

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.

Anish Kapoor

British contemporary artist

Content arises out of certain considerations about form, material, context-and that when that subject matter is sufficiently far away.

Anish Kapoor

British contemporary artist

I feel there’s everything to do yet.

Anish Kapoor

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.

Anish Kapoor

British contemporary artist

The idea is that the object has a language unto itself.

Anish Kapoor

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.

Anish Kapoor

British contemporary artist

Artists don’t make objects. Artists make mythologies.

Anish Kapoor

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.

Anish Kapoor

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.

Anish Kapoor

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?

Anish Kapoor

British contemporary artist

I am Indian, and I’m proud of it. Indian life is mythologically rich and powerful.

Anish Kapoor

British contemporary artist

Re-investing in one’s own little moments of insight is very important.

Anish Kapoor

British contemporary artist

I feel the symbolic world is the nub of a problem for an artist.

Anish Kapoor

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.

Anish Kapoor

British contemporary artist

The eye is a very quick instrument, much quicker than the ear. The eye gets it immediately.

Anish Kapoor

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.

Anish Kapoor

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.

Anish Kapoor

British contemporary artist

One doesn’t make art for other people, even though I am very concerned with the viewer.

Anish Kapoor

British contemporary artist