Time & Perspective Quote by Anish Kapoor

Kapoor’s line sounds almost modest until you hear the discipline inside it: “Re-investing” turns insight into something you can squander or compound. That’s a distinctly studio-born economics, where the most valuable currency isn’t productivity or visibility but attention paid back into the work. An artist has flashes all the time; the difference is whether those flashes become a practice or just a pleasant anecdote you tell at a dinner party.

The phrase “one’s own little moments” does a lot of quiet fighting. It deflates the cult of the grand revelation, the viral “breakthrough,” the heroic myth of inspiration arriving like lightning. Kapoor insists on the opposite scale: small, personal, fleeting perceptions that are easy to ignore because they don’t yet look like art. Calling them “little” isn’t self-deprecation; it’s a refusal of spectacle as the sole measure of significance.

Context matters here. Kapoor’s work often deals in the slow violence of perception: voids that look like surfaces, surfaces that behave like voids, pigments that swallow depth. These are artworks that reward return visits, not drive-bys. So “re-investing” also speaks to repetition: circling back to an intuition, testing it against materials, letting it contradict you, letting it mature. The subtext is an argument against the attention economy’s demand for constant novelty. Insight isn’t content; it’s a seed. If you don’t keep putting time back into it, you don’t get a sculpture, you get a slogan.