Art & Creativity Quote by Michel Foucault

Foucault is aiming at a quiet scandal: modern culture treats art like a product category, not a mode of being. The provocation is in the phrasing "only related to objects" - a jab at museums, markets, and institutions that freeze art into collectible things, stripped of the messy ways it once organized conduct, desire, and self-understanding. He is not mourning some lost golden age of authenticity; he is diagnosing a shift in how power sorts experience.

The subtext is classic Foucault: when art is quarantined as an object, it becomes governable. Objects can be cataloged, priced, insured, and curated; they fit neatly into the administrative imagination. Individuals and lives are harder. If art were bound up with "life", it would touch ethics and everyday practices, threatening the border between aesthetic choice and political formation. So art gets filed under culture, safely downstream from the real machinery of discipline.

Context matters. By the late 20th century, "high art" had been professionalized (art schools, criticism, grant systems), institutionalized (museums as arbiters), and financialized (the artwork as asset). Foucault, coming out of an intellectual world shaped by May '68 and skeptical of bourgeois humanism, pushes against the comforting idea that art is inherently liberating. His deeper intent is to reopen a possibility he later names more explicitly: an "aesthetics of existence" where the artwork is not the painting on the wall but the crafted life, the self treated as something made, revised, and resisted.