Daily Inspiration Quote by Andres Serrano

Serrano’s line is a neat act of jujitsu: he takes the familiar accusation lodged at provocative art - you’re desecrating what people hold sacred - and flips it into a claim of authorship. Not vandalism, but icon-making. The phrasing “I like to believe” matters. It’s not a manifesto; it’s a self-aware shield against the certainty demanded by culture-war arguments. Serrano knows he’s operating in the fog where reverence and outrage share the same fuel: attention.

Context does the heavy lifting here. Serrano’s career, especially the storm around Piss Christ, is built on images that read as devotional at a distance and destabilizing up close. He borrows the visual grammar of religious and institutional authority - luminous color, frontal composition, the aura of relics - then contaminates it with bodily reality, commerce, sex, death. The subtext is that icons were never pure to begin with. They’re manufactured, circulated, fought over, funded. If an image can be “destroyed” by a photograph, maybe the icon was already fragile - more brand than belief.

The intent, then, isn’t just to provoke; it’s to reassign power. Serrano positions himself not as a heckler outside the cathedral but as someone rearranging the altar. “New ones” is the tell: he’s claiming that scandal is productive, that the modern icon is forged in controversy and media reproduction. His photos don’t topple monuments so much as reveal how monuments work - by turning feeling into imagery, and imagery into leverage.