"A standard line, promoted by people like Clement Greenberg,... is that politics contaminates art, and Manet is often cited as an example of art for art's sake."

“The art world as a whole, and museums in particular, belong to what has aptly been called the "consciousness industry.”

“Starting on a large scale towards the end of the 1960s in the United States and expanding rapidly ever since, corporate funding has spread during the last five years to Britain and the Continent. Ambitious exhibition programs that could not be financed through traditional sources led museums to turn to corporations for support. The larger, more lavishly appointed these shows and their catalogues became, however, the more glamour the audiences began to expect.”

“When works of art are presented like rare butterflies on the walls, they're decontextualized. We admire their beauty, and I have nothing against that, per se. But there is more to art than that...”

“I have a particular interest in corporations that give themselves a cultural aura and are in other areas suspect. Philip Morris presents itself in New York as the lover of culture while it turns out that if you look behind the scenes, it is also a prime funder of Jesse Helms, someone who is very hostile to the arts.”

“It would be bypassing the issue to say that the artist's business is how to work with this and that material and manipulate the findings of perceptual psychology, and that the rest should be left to other professions... The total scope of information he receives everyday is of concern. An artist is an isolated system,... he has to continuously interact with the world around him. Theoretically there are no limits to his involvement.”

“The artist's business requires his involvement in practically everything. He works in reference, not to a section of the world, but to the whole world.”