Education Quote by Anish Kapoor

Kapoor is pointing at a quiet revolution in taste: “the exotic” has shifted from being a suspicious category to a marketable, even applauded, aesthetic. The line is doing two things at once. On the surface, it’s observational, almost generous toward “younger artists” who feel freer to draw from elsewhere. Underneath, it’s a critique of the art world’s gaze - who gets to be seen as sophisticated, who gets filed under “ethnic,” who gets granted the status of simply “contemporary.”

The phrase “the way we have learned to look” is the tell. Kapoor isn’t talking about artists changing; he’s talking about audiences, institutions, curators, collectors - the machinery that trains perception. “Learned” implies conditioning: the exotic isn’t an inherent quality in an artwork, it’s a label produced by power and habit. When he says it’s “much more acceptable,” you can hear the double edge: acceptance can mean genuine openness, but it can also mean a new kind of consumption, where difference becomes a style choice.

Context matters. Kapoor, an Indian-born artist who built a career in Britain, has long occupied the fault line between global prestige and the expectations placed on “non-Western” identity. His work has been celebrated for sensuous materiality and scale, yet he’s also navigated an art ecosystem that loves otherness as long as it’s legible, collectible, and elegantly framed.

So the subtext isn’t a victory lap. It’s a warning: when “exotic” becomes acceptable, it often means the center has found a new way to absorb the margins without surrendering control of the terms.