Art & Creativity Quote by Anish Kapoor

Kapoor frames art less as a career than as a wager on time. The line sounds casual, even optimistic, but it carries a quiet rebuke to a culture that treats creativity like a startup: prove your “value” fast, scale quickly, burn bright, pivot. By insisting it’s “not a 10-year game,” he’s pushing back against the grant-cycle mentality, the market’s appetite for the next hot thing, and the algorithmic pressure to constantly produce visible output. The real flex here is patience.

The subtext is also bodily. Kapoor’s work is famously physical: massive scale, difficult materials, fabrication teams, long production timelines, and the slow negotiation between idea, engineering, and space. Saying he hopes to be making art at 80 isn’t just sentimental longevity; it’s an assertion that the studio is a life practice, not a brand strategy. It implies that artistic authority comes from sustained looking and repeated risk, not from a single breakthrough.

Context matters because Kapoor speaks as someone who already has institutional validation - museums, public commissions, a market that can fund ambition. That position lets him romanticize duration, but it also makes the statement more pointed: even at the top, the work doesn’t “arrive.” There’s no permanent victory lap, only extended inquiry. “Long game” becomes a defense of depth over churn, and of an artistic life measured in decades of evolving questions rather than a timeline of wins.