Creativity Quote by Matthew Barney

Barney’s genius here is his refusal to let “car culture” stay in its expected lane. He walks right up to the fetish object - chrome, horsepower, masculinity-by-design - and then strips it of romance. “It isn’t really about loving cars” is a quiet act of vandalism against the way consumer culture wants desire to read: passion as purchase, identity as brand. What he offers instead is need, which is messier, less flattering, and more revealing.

The key word is “literal.” Contemporary art is often accused of being too symbolic, too evasive; Barney flips that critique into a method. If connections (between ideas, bodies, myths, systems) risk becoming airy, he wants the weight of them - torque, friction, the undeniable fact of a machine moving through space. A “vehicle” isn’t just transportation; it’s an apparatus for making abstraction behave. The car becomes a prosthetic for thought: a way to stage transformation, constraint, and propulsion in material form.

There’s also an American subtext that’s hard to miss. Cars promise freedom, but Barney’s phrasing leans toward dependence: “needing them.” That need can be infrastructural (you can’t live in much of the U.S. without a car), psychological (mobility as control), even erotic (the body merged with machine). In an art world that loves irony at a safe distance, Barney admits the uncomfortable intimacy: not admiration, but entanglement. The car isn’t his muse. It’s his mechanism.