Creativity Quote by Anish Kapoor

Kapoor’s line reads like a quiet rebuke to an art world that’s learned to fetishize everything except the thing itself. “Pursue content” sounds almost anti-stylistic, even anti-market: a reminder that an artist’s job isn’t to perfect a signature look or keep feeding the algorithm, but to chase what’s worth saying before it’s fully sayable. The verb matters. “Pursue” implies restlessness, a moving target, a refusal to treat meaning as a fixed payload you can package and ship. It’s also a little combative: content doesn’t arrive on a schedule; it has to be hunted.

Coming from Kapoor, the phrase carries a sly double exposure. His work is often discussed in terms of spectacle and surface - the abyssal voids, the mirror-polished seductions, the notorious Vantablack controversy. He knows how easily contemporary art gets reduced to an image, a stunt, a “moment.” This sentence pushes back: the allure is not the point, it’s the vehicle. He’s arguing for an older, almost spiritual idea of art - not as decoration or branding, but as a method for generating meaning that can’t be reached by discourse alone.

The subtext is disciplinary. Artists are being asked, constantly, to be legible: to provide statements, politics, identity tags, a thesis. Kapoor suggests the opposite direction of travel. Start with form, material, obsession, risk - and keep going until the work yields its own content. If it feels like a modest claim, that’s part of its force: it makes the artist responsible not for answers, but for the chase.