Daily Inspiration Quote by Andres Serrano

Serrano’s line is half confession, half warning: don’t mistake the polished gallery object for something clean, neutral, or universally “uplifting.” Obsession isn’t a quirky side habit here; it’s the engine that makes the work possible, the private compulsion that gives images their charge. In photography especially, where the medium is often misread as simple capture, he insists on authorship as appetite: what you return to, what you can’t stop circling, what you’re willing to look at longer than etiquette allows.

The subtext is also a preemptive defense against the moral bookkeeping that has trailed Serrano since Piss Christ and the NEA-era culture wars. When your practice is constantly interrogated for taste, decency, or “respect,” claiming obsession reframes the argument. He’s not pleading innocence; he’s asserting necessity. The work isn’t designed to flatter the viewer’s comfort or align with civic virtue. It’s designed to press on taboo materials and sacred symbols until they reveal how fragile our boundaries are between reverence and revulsion, beauty and contamination.

There’s a sly inclusivity in “his or her” that keeps the statement from macho romanticism, but the thrust is blunt: no obsession, no signature; no signature, no artist. Serrano is staking out a modernist premise in a late-20th-century battlefield: personal fixation as the one credible source of intensity in a culture that constantly asks art to behave.