Love Quote by Andres Serrano

Serrano’s line lands like a confession from someone who has made a career out of baiting the viewer’s stomach and then interrogating their conscience. “Oftentimes we love the thing we hate and vice versa” isn’t a soft paradox; it’s a diagnostic for modern spectatorship, especially the kind that gathers around transgressive images. Serrano knows that our strongest aesthetic attachments are rarely clean. Disgust can be a form of intimacy. Outrage can be a kind of devotion.

As a photographer associated with work that has sparked public controversy, he’s pointing at the emotional double-bind built into looking: you can’t claim to be repelled without also admitting you looked long enough to be repelled. The hate becomes a spotlight, an attention economy of moral posture that still feeds the object. Meanwhile, love often arrives with a shadow: we adore what unsettles us because it makes us feel alert, righteous, alive, “in on it.” Serrano’s subtext is that we’re not just inconsistent; we’re complicit. The line collapses the usual binaries (good taste/bad taste, sacred/profane, admiration/condemnation) that critics and censors rely on.

Context matters because photography, more than many arts, trades on the authority of the real. If the image looks like evidence, then your reaction feels like a verdict. Serrano is saying the jury is crooked. Our responses are rarely pure judgments of the work; they’re negotiations with our own desires, taboos, and the pleasure of being scandalized. That’s why the sentence works: it forces the reader to recognize themselves in the contradiction, not as a personal flaw, but as the hidden engine of cultural controversy.