"“Anyone who is not entirely blind to social reality will likewise recognize as hypocritical the right-wing claim that the work in Sensation is “sick and offensive.” The truly “sick and offensive” facts of modern life are the social conditions—poverty, homelessness, misery of all kinds—presided over and continuously made worse by those making the claim. Nothing in art can come close to that. If anything, the irony is—and this is something I would like to return to—that the art in Sensation is an all too accurate reflection of some of the more retrograde tendencies in contemporary society.” "


“One gets the sense that some of these painters and sculptors—like many youthful “celebrities” today, whether in sports, popular music or films—have been picked up by the art industry and its operators, fed into its maw and never allowed to mature. They are obliged to remain artificially “young” for commercial reasons. This has to affect the work they do.”



“…[artists] have become the play-thing to a large extent of the wealthy and powerful, and their work takes the form of a cool and self-serving accommodation to the social transformation. There is no anger, no protest, relatively little compassion for society’s victims. Entirely excluded is the possibility of altering external or internal reality. (Why should it be changed, anyway? Some of the artists have made a bundle and are not at all dissatisfied.) There is only the clever maneuvering among and within existing objects and relations, a universe of openings, galas, tabloids, rock stars, pornography and mass media. Utopian vision is absent, and so for that matter is the anti-utopian; the art is largely of the present moment, the moment least important for art.”