Creativity Quote by Anish Kapoor

Kapoor is taking a quiet swing at the most comfortable way audiences consume art: as lifestyle wallpaper. “Decorative facade” is a loaded phrase because it’s not just about prettiness; it’s about art being flattened into surface, reduced to something that behaves nicely in a lobby or on a collector’s wall. When he says “take seriously this vocation,” he’s positioning art as an ethical practice, not a vibes-based hobby. The word “vocation” carries a near-religious weight: a calling with obligations. That framing makes “decorative” sound like a kind of betrayal.

The intent is also strategic self-definition. Kapoor’s work has always played with seduction - immaculate surfaces, saturated pigments, mirror-finish steel that turns viewers into part of the piece. He knows spectacle works. The subtext is: seduction is a tool, not the endpoint. He invites you in with beauty, then tries to destabilize you with scale, voids, and disorienting reflections that mess with your sense of where the artwork ends and you begin.

Context matters: Kapoor rises in a late-20th-century art world where “decorative” can be a dismissive label, especially for work that’s sensually pleasing. His statement is a preemptive defense against that pigeonhole and a critique of the market logic that rewards the instantly legible object. He’s arguing for art that earns its authority by doing something riskier than looking good: rerouting perception, provoking bodily awareness, and insisting that depth isn’t optional.