Art & Creativity Quote by Anish Kapoor

Art, Kapoor suggests, now arrives with a receipt attached: you are expected to feel the maker behind the making. That phrasing - "one of the great currents" - frames this as a cultural tide rather than a personal preference, as if contemporary art has been pulled into a new physics where biography exerts gravity on interpretation. The work no longer gets to be only itself; it is increasingly read as an emission from lived experience.

The intent is double-edged. On one hand, Kapoor validates a dominant expectation in museums, biennials, and press releases: the artist statement as origin story, trauma as explanatory engine, identity as interpretive shortcut. On the other, he subtly distances himself from it. "Seems to come out of" is slippery language, hinting that the link between artwork and authorial experience is partly constructed - by audiences, institutions, and markets hungry for narrative certainty.

The subtext lands in the politics of authenticity. Contemporary culture rewards art that can be morally legible: you can locate the "why" in the artist's life and feel socially oriented in your attention. That's not only empathy; it's consumption. Biography becomes a way to stabilize difficult work, to make abstraction answerable, to turn ambiguity into testimony.

For Kapoor - an artist associated with sensuous, often non-narrative forms that resist easy paraphrase - the line also reads as a warning. When art is reduced to a personal backstory, the artwork's other powers get downgraded: its capacity to exceed intention, to generate meanings the author didn't plan, to confront the viewer as an experience rather than a case study.