Creativity Quote by Christo

Deadlines are for people who think art is an appointment. Christo, who spent decades persuading bureaucracies, landowners, engineers, and the public to temporarily remake whole landscapes, is smuggling a radical idea into a plainspoken sentence: the timeline is not a logistical detail, it is the artwork's moral spine.

"Now" sets a conversational, almost managerial tone, as if he's offering a practical update. Then he pulls the rug: "there is no way to say how long some projects take". Not "I won't say" but "there is no way" - the impossibility is structural. With Christo and Jeanne-Claude's practice, years of negotiation, permits, and fundraising weren't obstacles to the real work; they were the real work, part of the sculpture's invisible mass. The public sees fabric unfurling over a bridge or a coastline for two weeks. The artists lived inside the prelude for years.

The kicker is "that's our principle". Principle sounds ethical, even constitutional. He's not romanticizing chaos; he's defending a discipline of patience. In a culture that treats speed as competence and certainty as professionalism, Christo flips the prestige hierarchy. Unpredictability becomes a form of integrity: you don't force a project into a schedule that flatters institutions, sponsors, or news cycles. You let the scale of persuasion - political, environmental, human - dictate the tempo.

Subtext: temporary art is only as free as the process that births it. Refusing to promise a finish date is Christo's way of keeping the work unowned, un-rushed, and uncompromised.