Art & Creativity Quote by Bruce Nauman

Nauman’s line reads less like an aesthetic musing than a studio alarm bell: art isn’t a category to admire, it’s a problem to keep open. The first half - “what art is supposed to be” - invokes the whole apparatus of permission: museums, critics, craft, tradition, the invisible rulebook that decides what counts. But “supposed to” is doing the real work here. It signals suspicion toward inherited definitions, as if the very idea of a stable assignment for art is a constraint worth testing, maybe even breaking.

Then he pivots: “and can become.” That shift is Nauman in miniature. His career is essentially a long experiment in turning the studio into a lab where sculpture can be a corridor, a neon sentence, a filmed endurance task, a setup that makes you bodily anxious. The subtext is that art’s future isn’t discovered by thinking harder; it’s forced into view by pushing materials, language, and attention until the old borders start to fail. Nauman’s “concern” isn’t pious. It’s pragmatic and slightly combative: if art has a job description, who wrote it, and who benefits from keeping it narrow?

Context matters: coming of age in the 1960s and 70s, when Minimalism, Conceptual art, and performance were detonating traditional objects, Nauman treats “art” as a live wire rather than a museum noun. The quote works because it refuses comfort. It frames art as an unstable contract between maker, institution, and viewer - one that can be renegotiated, but only if someone is willing to make the room uncomfortable enough to notice.