Art & Creativity Quote by Larry Rivers

Rivers gives “communication” a twist: art doesn’t transmit a fixed message so much as it meets you where you already are. The line is deceptively casual, but it’s a quiet rebuke to the museum-label fantasy that every painting, song, or performance has a correct reading waiting to be decoded. Instead, meaning behaves like improvisation. You arrive with a tempo - grief, boredom, desire, defensiveness - and the work plays off it.

Coming from Larry Rivers, that’s not just a feel-good relativism; it’s an artist’s survival strategy. Rivers lived in the messy borderlands between music and visual art, between high culture and street-level swagger, between reverence for tradition and an almost punk impulse to mess with it. In that world, intention is never pure. Quotation, parody, and pastiche are tools, and “message” gets contaminated by attitude. His claim smuggles in a broader point: reception is an active act, a performance by the viewer.

The subtext is accountability, too. If “any art” communicates what you’re “in the mood to receive,” then the audience can’t pretend they’re innocent. Your response reveals you - your hunger for clarity, your tolerance for ambiguity, your need to be flattered or challenged. Rivers frames art as a mirror that changes with the light, which is why it can feel profound one day and pointless the next. He’s arguing for a dynamic relationship: the artwork is stable; the listener isn’t.