Creativity Quote by Anish Kapoor

Kapoor’s line is a neat little refusal of the modern demand that every artwork arrive with a mission statement attached. “Agenda” is the loaded word: it evokes policy, branding, and the kind of pre-approved message that turns art into a press release. By insisting he’s “not an artist who has an agenda that’s set by the work,” Kapoor flips the usual expectation that the artwork dictates the artist’s politics or that the artist must be legible through a single, consistent “take.” He’s defending a practice built on sensation, scale, and the viewer’s unstable relation to space - the vertigo of a void, the seduction of a reflective surface, the way a form seems to swallow the room.

The subtext is also about authorship and control. Kapoor has spent decades making objects that feel like events: the piece doesn’t merely sit there; it performs on you. If the work “sets” an agenda, it can start to boss the artist around, forcing each new project to serve the last one’s interpretation. Kapoor’s statement protects uncertainty as a creative method. It’s a posture against being pinned to a single explanatory frame - especially in a period when public art, museum programming, and funding ecosystems increasingly reward clear moral deliverables.

Context matters because Kapoor’s career sits right on the fault line between the studio and the spectacle. His monumental commissions and high-profile controversies invite people to read intention as ideology. This sentence is a preemptive strike: the work may provoke, even implicate you, but it won’t be reduced to a tidy agenda machine.