Life's Pleasures Quote by Richard Serra

Name-dropping usually reads as insecurity. Here it lands as a quiet credential, the kind Serra can deliver because his work never begged for applause. “I used to eat lunch with Billy Wilder when I first came out here” is a small sentence with a big shadow: Hollywood’s legendary cynic as tablemate, daily bread as apprenticeship, conversation as an informal studio.

The verb choice does the heavy lifting. Not “met,” not “worked with,” not even “talked to.” “Eat lunch” is intimate and unglamorous, a ritual that implies repetition, proximity, and a certain equality. Serra frames his arrival (“first came out here”) as a formative moment, and he signals that his education wasn’t only in art departments and foundries; it was also in the narrative machine that Wilder mastered. Wilder’s films are built on control: what you reveal, when you cut, how you weaponize restraint. Serra’s sculpture, for all its brute scale, is likewise about orchestration - guiding bodies through space, making weight and balance feel like plot.

There’s also a sly cultural triangulation. A sculptor invoking a filmmaker hints at the porousness of postwar American modernism, where serious art and mass entertainment weren’t sealed worlds but adjacent ecosystems for ambitious arrivals. Serra doesn’t sentimentalize it. The line is bare, almost tossed off, which is its own kind of Wilder-esque cool: the implication that the real influence was absorbed casually, over lunch, from someone who understood that craft is inseparable from temperament.