Daily Inspiration Quote by Bruce Nauman

Influence is supposed to be the artist’s trophy, the invisible crown that proves the work mattered. Nauman swats it away as “embarrassing,” and the deflation is the point. Coming from a sculptor who spent decades turning the studio into a testing ground for language, repetition, and bodily discomfort, the line reads less like modesty than like a refusal of the art-world script: make work, accrue aura, become a reference point, harden into a brand.

“I don’t like to think” is doing quiet labor here. Nauman isn’t denying that influence happens; he’s rejecting the self-conscious posture of someone trying to manage it. To “think about being an influence” is to start curating your legacy in real time, to make art as PR for future artists. That kind of strategic self-mythologizing can infect process, turning experimentation into a bid for permanence. For an artist whose practice often insists on awkwardness, uncertainty, and the unglamorous loop of trying-and-failing, the idea of influence is embarrassing because it implies control, entitlement, even a whiff of paternalism.

There’s also a generational context: postwar American art learned how quickly “influence” becomes canon formation, and canon formation becomes gatekeeping. Nauman’s work has been absorbed into the bloodstream of contemporary practice, but he resists the victory lap. The subtext is ethical as much as aesthetic: make the work, let it misbehave, and don’t confuse reception with intention. Influence, he suggests, is something that should happen behind your back.