Richard Serra Answers: Why Make Art?

Why make art?

What do you find by doing it?

What does it get you?

I always wanted an alternative existence,

and by that I mean I wanted to do something

where I could study my own
sentiments and experiences.

And I found that I could do that in relation to making things and making art in particular.

And I did it since I was a kid,

and it was a place that I always could go to,

that I could concentrate and deal with problems

that I thought were of interest to me.

And, if I was clear enough about

what it was that I was probing and stayed with the premise of what I was probing,

it was possible that it could also
be clear to someone else.

And it was important that it not be
something that somebody else had done.

I think one of the things art does is

it asks you to perceive what it is on its own level.

And it can come up and grab you at any time.

It can be reassuring.

It could be exactly the opposite.

It could agitate you.

It could be something you dismiss.

It could be something that engages you.

It could be something you recall.

It could be something that leads to things

that have nothing to do with what you're looking at.

So, I think, works of art engage, possibly,

an internal memory bank that isn't linear,

and it can make you see
the outside reality in that way, also.

Like, you probably see the world

in ways that you would not have seen it

if those artists had not existed.

And do I think that Cézanne changed

how people saw a landscape in France
in the last century, for sure.

Do I think Warhol changed how we see
contemporary society through painting,

through the media-ization of, the commodification of objects?

For sure.

And you can just go through
the history of art that way,

and immediately you conjure up something

that you, yourself, could not have expressed,

and it fulfills in each of us something we lack.