Museums are managers of consciousness. They give us an interpretation of history, of how to view the world and locate ourselves in it. They are, if you want to put it in positive terms, great educational institutions. If you want to put it in negative terms, they are propaganda machines.

Art in the art world, and culture in general, are branches of the media, which produces our political and social thinking climate.

Whenever the medium of photography is useful for a particular task, I use it. If another medium is more suitable I use that.

Trivializing the Holocaust is the last thing I want to do.

What I'm very upset about is the attempt to dictate to museums what they show, and the statements made by politicians in Washington that have curtailed the freedom of the National Endowment for the Arts. The attention to those issues is deflected by the spin of my supposedly having trivialized the Holocaust.

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.

Art-making is just another part of the consciousness industry.