The visual arts are about communication. If I was talking about my work, I wouldn’t purposefully try and be obscure, I would do my best to be eloquent and communicate properly. When I’m creating a piece of work, it’s the same thing. I don’t like that removal from the audience of a piece of work; the artist who created it isn’t in touch with his audience anymore and the audience are trying to figure out what the fuck it’s about, and it’s still put onto a pedestal in that triumphant kind of way. I hate that kind of arrogance. What I enjoy doing is communicating with an audience and letting that audience communicate with me.
With the advent of the internet over the last ten years or so, being able to be in touch with your audience has become a much more real part of creating a piece of work. I can take a picture on my mobile phone and have it published globally within five seconds, without anybody saying ‘Well, it’s OK but it’s not going to make any money.’ Before, there were all these systems set up, be it contemporary art galleries, record companies, film companies, magazines, whatever, all set up in a way that work could be only be justified if someone was making money out of it. It’s not necessarily about the merit of the work whether you could make 1/2 million Euros out of it and it therefore being worth showing. What the internet has done is taken all of that away, so if a piece of work is good then people will look at it, and if it’s not good then they won’t. I like that democratization.
