Art & Creativity Quote by Jerzy Kosinski

Art, Kosinski suggests, is less a vehicle than a brake. “To pause, not bypass” turns aesthetics into an ethic: the artist’s job isn’t to speed the audience along a pre-approved route, but to interrupt the commute. The line works because it sounds almost like advice for traffic, and that’s the point. Modern life trains us to skim, to shortcut, to treat experience as something to get through. Art, by contrast, is engineered friction.

Kosinski’s wording is deceptively simple. “Principle” gives it the ring of a rule, not a preference, and “pause” is active rather than passive. It’s not mere stillness; it’s a chosen refusal to continue on momentum. “Bypass” implies both avoidance and infrastructure: the bypass road is built to keep you from having to look at what’s actually there. In that sense, the quote smuggles in a critique of convenience culture and ideological self-protection. We bypass discomfort, complexity, other people.

Context matters: Kosinski’s work often circles power, manipulation, and the ways systems train individuals to perform versions of themselves. Read against that backdrop, “pause” becomes a small act of resistance. The artist stages a moment where the usual scripts fail, where attention can’t be automated. It’s also a warning to artists: don’t collude with speed. Don’t make work that merely confirms what the viewer already believes, delivering them back to their routines with a tasteful afterglow. The pause is where perception changes; the bypass is where nothing does.