Art & Creativity Quote by Larry Rivers

Rivers smuggles a radical idea into a casual, musicianly shrug: art doesn’t transmit meaning like a package in the mail; it gets remixed by the listener’s emotional equalizer. “Any art” is the provocation. Not great art, not difficult art, not the stuff with museum lighting. Anything. He’s flattening the hierarchy and then quietly shifting power from maker to receiver.

The line works because it refuses the romance of the all-powerful artist without cynically declaring art meaningless. Mood isn’t ignorance here; it’s the filter that makes interpretation possible. Rivers came up in the postwar American scene where categories were being smashed on purpose: jazz phrasing bleeding into painting, painting borrowing collage and advertisement, seriousness delivered with a wink. In that world, the “message” is less a thesis than a set of cues - rhythm, tone, texture - that audiences complete differently depending on what they need that day.

The subtext is both democratic and slightly unsettling. If meaning depends on receptivity, then no artwork is safe from being misunderstood, trivialized, or turned into personal therapy. Rivers doesn’t fight that; he treats it as the real contract. The quote also doubles as a critique of gatekeeping: critics can’t fully police interpretation because they don’t control the audience’s weather.

There’s a musician’s pragmatism underneath it. You can play the same standard two nights in a row and hear it land as confession, joke, or background noise. Rivers is saying: the art is constant, but the receiver is the instrument that changes.