Daily Inspiration Quote by Andres Serrano

There is something almost performatively American about a public artist confessing political abstinence: it reads like a refusal to audition for respectability. Coming from Andres Serrano, a photographer whose name still carries the shrapnel of the Culture Wars (Piss Christ wasn’t just a work; it was a congressional talking point), the line lands less as apathy than as posture. He’s not claiming innocence. He’s claiming distance.

Serrano’s images thrive on institutions and their taboos: religion, patriotism, sex, bodies, death. Voting is the civic ritual that flatters the system by implying consent. “I have never voted in my life” punctures that ritual with one clean pin. It’s a way of saying: I don’t want your receipt. Don’t count me as a participant in the same machinery that polices what my work is allowed to be.

The subtext is not “politics don’t matter.” It’s “your politics are too small.” Serrano’s practice is about looking at what the public would rather outsource to myth or moral panic. In that light, voting can look like a comforting transaction: you pick a lever, you feel aligned, you go home. His refusal frames citizenship as something messier and less quantifiable, closer to witness than to membership.

There’s also a strategic sting: in an era where artists are expected to be flawlessly legible - declare your causes, post your ballot selfie, brand your conscience - Serrano offers illegibility as a kind of autonomy. Whether you admire it or hate it, the sentence works because it forces the listener to confront how much of “engagement” is optics, and how quickly dissent gets domesticated into civic virtue.