Relevant Art

Well, no, not really—if I can join in—I think we’re more concerned with art that has relevance to people’s lives. That sort of stuff means nothing to ethnics or women on council estates. Now I’m just throwing a monkey into the room here, but what if we think of, say, toilet graffiti as being no different from Rembrandt’s drawings? That may sound a shockingly new thing to say but we have to have the courage to embrace the new. We call that sort of outmoded ‘culture’ ‘bourgeois’—that’s middle-class—snobbish—and it’s only meaningful to people in that group.