Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Serra

Serra’s line lands like a dry aside, but it’s really an alarm bell: the state isn’t just regulating images, it’s appointing itself the final interpreter of bodies, desire, and meaning. The small, almost throwaway phrasing - “they’ve also” - is doing heavy lifting. It implies a creeping mandate: first the government controls funding, permits, education, public space; now it’s sliding into the intimate territory of definition itself. Not what’s legal, not what’s appropriate, but what “is.” That verb turns censorship into ontology.

Coming from a sculptor whose work is inseparable from scale, weight, and public encounter, the jab makes sense. Serra knows institutions shape perception. A plaza, a museum, a zoning board: these are not neutral containers but forces that choreograph what can be seen and how it can be experienced. When he points to the government “deciding” sexual content, he’s exposing how cultural authority gets laundered as common sense. The subtext is that the fight isn’t about a single controversial artwork; it’s about who gets to set the categories that make controversy possible.

The quote also catches a distinctly American paradox: we narrate ourselves as suspicious of state power while repeatedly asking the state to arbitrate morality. Serra’s skepticism isn’t prurient or theoretical. It’s a practical artist’s warning that once officials can define “sexual content,” they can redefine it whenever convenient - expanding the label to discipline artists, queer visibility, sex education, or anything else that makes a nervous electorate feel briefly in control.