Creativity Quote by Chuck Close

Chuck Close is baiting you into admitting how lazy your looking has become. The question sounds almost shruggy, even anti-theoretical, but it’s a trap: if you think a photograph is a shortcut and a still life is the “real” thing, you’re already outsourcing perception to hierarchy. Close levels the playing field with a single blunt standard: attention. Not authenticity, not medium, not aura - the work begins (and ends) in the act of sustained looking.

The line lands with extra force in the context of Close’s career, which was built on using photographs as raw material for paintings that are anything but mechanical. His process - grids, incremental marks, the slow construction of a face from thousands of decisions - exposes how much interpretation sits inside any supposedly objective image. A photo doesn’t eliminate judgment; it just hides it. By insisting “You still have to look,” Close insists the viewer is not a passive consumer but a collaborator, responsible for finishing the picture with perception.

There’s also a quiet democratizing provocation here. If a photo is fair game, then the old gatekeeping around “from life” collapses, and with it the romance of the artist as heroic witness. Close isn’t arguing that all images are equal; he’s arguing that seeing is labor. In an image-saturated culture trained to skim, he makes looking feel like ethics: slow down, stay with it, earn what you think you know.