Seeing your work go into storage in an art museum is obviously a tragedy of any cultural product - which doesn't mean I am anti-institutional.
Aleksandra MirI'm very jealous of an era where people were inventing something so beautiful as the Concorde and thinking that's the next step. I'm jealous of an era when people thought, "Let's finally go to the Moon."
Aleksandra MirThe Stonehenge proposal got a lot of interesting criticism. One of the best - or worst - said something like, "Go home to Las Vegas." I think this project could possibly be realized at a very late part of my career. Right now, I don't have the authority, the budget, the credibility.
Aleksandra MirPeople get upset when Baghdad, the "Cradle of Civilization" is burning, or when the Buddhas in Afghanistan are falling. These are real concerns.
Aleksandra MirThere are ends, occasionally, with projects. That happens. But they are natural dead ends. It's usually the outside situation that demands an ending. I never really settle for one.
Aleksandra MirI'm completely uninterested in the origins of Stonehenge. I don't care about the real story behind it or whether it should be saved or not. What I'm interested in is this: in the Victorian era, you could go there as an early cultural tourist and you were given a chisel to chip off a bit of the stones and take it with you. That's what you did in Victorian times.
Aleksandra Mir