Wealth & Money Quote by Anish Kapoor

Kapoor’s pride lands less like a flag-waving slogan than a strategic reclaiming of narrative in an art world that loves “global” artists right up until they get too specific. “I am Indian” is a refusal of the polite vagueness that often gets demanded of diasporic figures: be cosmopolitan, be legible, be exportable. By saying it plainly, he controls the frame before anyone else can turn his background into a curatorial footnote or a marketing texture.

The phrase “mythologically rich and powerful” does two things at once. It asserts depth against the West’s long habit of treating non-European culture as ornamental, spiritual-but-not-serious. At the same time, it sidesteps the narrow expectation that an Indian artist must illustrate India in a documentary way. Myth is a clever escape hatch: it’s shared memory, not journalism; symbolic, not literal; a license to work at the level of archetype, scale, void, and sensation. That fits Kapoor’s practice, which often aims for the bodily and the uncanny rather than the explicitly representational.

There’s subtext, too, about who gets to claim universality. Western modernism has historically branded itself as the default “human” language, while other traditions get labeled “cultural.” Kapoor flips that hierarchy by implying Indian life already contains an engine of meaning-making vast enough to power modern work without apology or translation.

Context matters: Kapoor has long navigated being an Indian-born artist based in Britain, celebrated in major institutions, and frequently interpreted through the politics of identity. This line preempts reduction. It’s not asking to be seen as “authentic”; it’s insisting that the mythic is not a niche. It’s a source of authority.