Creativity Quote by Howard Hodgkin

Collecting, in Howard Hodgkin's hands, stops being a charming hobby and starts behaving like a dependency. The first line is a quiet reversal of the usual power dynamic: we think the collector curates the collection, but Hodgkin insists the collection curates the collector. "Makes its own demands" gives objects agency, as if paintings and artifacts accrue a kind of gravity that reorganizes your time, money, and attention around them. It's an artist's way of describing a feedback loop: the more you acquire, the more acquisition feels necessary, and the less space you have for the slower, riskier work of making.

Calling it "an illness" is deliberately abrasive. Hodgkin isn't moralizing about materialism in the abstract; he's naming a compulsion that masquerades as taste. In art-world culture, collecting can be framed as connoisseurship, patronage, even identity-building. Hodgkin punctures that romance. He knows the overlap: many artists collect because they're visually hungry, because looking is part of the job. But he also knows how easily the appetite for influence and proximity to greatness can become a substitute for producing your own.

"I felt it was using up too much energy" lands like a practical diagnosis, not a melodrama. For an artist, energy is the scarce resource: the capacity to stay uncertain, to revise, to fail privately. Hodgkin's subtext is about protecting that resource from a seductive, socially sanctioned distraction. The sharpest implication is that collecting can look like engagement with art while quietly hollowing out the conditions required to make it.