Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Serra

Serra’s sentence sounds almost modest until you remember who’s speaking: a sculptor whose work often arrives like a verdict in steel. The line is doing a quiet but pointed reframing. Instead of treating exhibition as a neutral stage where “good work” naturally triumphs, he treats it as a fraught relationship - one that exposes the artist’s vulnerabilities, logistics, and power dynamics as much as it showcases objects.

The key move is “different relations.” Serra isn’t offering a therapeutic shrug; he’s rejecting the art-world fantasy that there’s a single correct way to be seen. For some artists, exhibition is oxygen: circulation, visibility, the social life of art. For others, it’s an extraction process. Showing work can mean scaling it up, translating it into a saleable format, negotiating curators and insurers, performing legibility for an audience, or accepting that the room’s architecture and institutional agenda will rewrite what the work “is.” For a practice like Serra’s, where site, mass, and bodily navigation are central, those pressures aren’t abstract. They’re physical, expensive, and political.

The subtext is also defensive in a Serra way: a preemptive strike against moralizing about accessibility, publicity, or “playing the game.” He’s granting difference while protecting artistic autonomy. In a culture that rewards constant output and constant visibility, Serra’s line insists that the problem of being exhibited isn’t a personal quirk - it’s a structural condition of making art at all.