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