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

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

Museums are not normally presenting the works on the walls as provocations to work. It's more like going to a Jacuzzi.

A liberal public is interesting to have as an audience. It is for that very reason that corporations make such an effort to ally themselves with cultural institutions.

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.

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.

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.