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.

Artists and art institutions have to learn how to play hardball. A democratic society needs a democratic art and we have a right to demand it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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