Creativity Quote by Anish Kapoor

Kapoor’s line is a quiet demolition of the romantic artist-brand: the genius myth, the tortured seer, the singular visionary with a destiny. He’s not denying ambition or originality; he’s warning against the narcotic of self-narrative. “Mythologies” signals stories that feel true because they’re flattering and repeatable. The danger isn’t that they’re false in some factual sense, but that they harden into a working theory of the self - a set of habits disguised as identity.

The phrasing is deliberately austere. “One must not” has the tone of a studio rule, not a confession. It’s addressed as much to younger artists as to an art world that rewards legible personas: the marketable backstory, the signature obsession, the neatly packaged “practice.” Kapoor’s own career sits in the pressure zone where mythmaking is constant: monumental public commissions, high-stakes material experiments, and the cult aura around works that play with voids, mirrors, and the sublime. The more iconic the output, the stronger the temptation to retroactively narrate it as inevitability.

Subtext: the artist’s greatest enemy may be their own press release. Believing your mythology makes you start performing “Anish Kapoor” (or whoever you are) instead of staying available to uncertainty, failure, and pivot. It also smuggles in entitlement: if you’re a myth, criticism becomes heresy and evolution becomes betrayal. Kapoor’s insistence reads like a discipline of humility, but it’s really a strategy for staying alive creatively: keep the story provisional, keep the work doing the talking, keep your self-image from becoming your medium.