Daily Inspiration Quote by Gavin Bryars

A small confession of suspicion sits inside this politely worded sentence: Bryars is admitting he expected the arts to stay in their lanes. The “however” does a lot of work. It frames the project as an exception to an assumed rule - that sculpture belongs to space and material, while radio belongs to time and immaterial vibration. His curiosity isn’t just personal; it’s a snapshot of a cultural moment when collaboration across mediums still carried a whiff of category error.

The real drama is in the phrase “a sculptor should be interested.” Bryars positions the sculptor as the surprising agent, which reveals an older hierarchy: musicians might flirt with visual art, but sculptors moving toward sound - especially disembodied sound - reads as transgressive. “Especially on a project for radio” sharpens that friction. Radio is sculpture’s opposite: no object, no gallery, no aura of the handmade. It’s mass distribution, domestic space, and an audience that may not even be paying attention. Bryars is clocking how odd it feels to translate a practice built on presence into a medium defined by absence.

Subtextually, he’s also staking out his own openness. The sentence is cautious, but not dismissive; it’s the tone of someone watching the borders of his field dissolve and realizing that’s where the interesting work is. In late-20th-century art culture - post-Cage, post-conceptualism - sound becomes another material, and radio becomes a site for sculpture by other means: carving attention, shaping duration, building an “object” out of listening. Bryars’ curiosity is the doorway to that redefinition.