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.

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.

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.

I have a particular interest in corporations that give themselves a cultural aura and are in other areas suspect. Philip Morris presents itself in New York as the lover of culture while it turns out that if you look behind the scenes, it is also a prime funder of Jesse Helms, someone who is very hostile to the arts.

After Charlottesville, our politics have now borne witness to a U.S. president at times openly defending neo-Nazis and white supremacists before condemning them.

Government must start to look at mobile infrastructure as a critical national resource and not just a resource for tax dollars.

All art is political in the sense that it serves someone's politics.

The values and voices of democracy are silent. Either we have lost touch with those values or, no better, believe they need not or cannot be taught.