Bob and Roberta Smith

A lot of what I do is to irritate people, really, and to make them think about things in different ways. . . . I was thinking it would be great to say actually that Tate Modern is as important as the National Health Service.

Society wants you to think that art is a nice-to-have and not a must-have. So governments and funders fund things, because they think art is about the excessive. But actually art is very important, because everything is made—these chairs, this microphone, the floor, your shoes, my hat—by a human being. Art is a huge conversation between human beings who are alive, of the past, and human beings in the future, who will look at this after I’m dead, hopefully. –Bob and Roberta Smith