To appreciate art you’ve got to work at it a bit.

The middle class male thinks he has a monopoly on objectivity.

Beauty and seriousness are perhaps the most shocking tactics left to artists these days.

Art is not some fun add-on to life.

It is true that there are not many smiling faces in modern art galleries. Happy art is much harder to make. Art and humour are uneasy bedfellows. Artists need strong feelings to motivate them to make things. I am often fuelled by anger.

If you're in the culture business, you're not so locked in to your class, or you can have fun with it.

The basic premise of taste, as Stephen Bayley, the cultural critic, said, is that taste is that which does not alienate your peers. Most people want to fit in with their tribe in some way or another, so they give off signals, whether it's with their clothes, their behavior, their car, their whatever, and gain status. Every tribe has a hierarchy, and that's what taste is: it's an unconscious display of who you are, and where you want to be.