Attempts to juggle domestic responsibilities with artistic production have often resulted in smaller bodies of work, and often works smaller in scale, than those produced by male contemporaries. Yet art history continues to privilege prodigious output and monumental scale or conception over the selective and the intimate.
It's a tour of the gay art history of the Vatican, so it's telling the backstory of a lot of the artists who did happen to be gay and talking a little bit about the eroticism of the art, which is very prevalent and very obvious but left out in the typical, kind of staid and, let's be honest, boring standard Vatican tour.
Abstract art as it is conceived at present is a game bequeathed to painting and sculpture by art history. One who accepts its premises must consent to limit his imagination to a depressing casuistry regarding the formal requirements of modernism.
But I do think it’s important to make younger people aware of what came before in every aspect of every art form. And it’s exciting too, and as you do that very often if you’re working with young people and working with students. I use mentoring, the idea is you do get a lot out of it. I do get a kind of regeneration of that, to see that excitement sometimes, to show, let’s say The Magic Box or Yojimbo - it’s part of being alive.