Michael Craig-Martin (b. 1941)

"Art allows one to step back and take stock. What I love about the last twenty years is that contemporary art used to be incredibly marginal - people thought it was, at best, unintelligible. Very few people looked at it as a way of gaining an understanding of their own moment, of what it’s like to be alive now. hat's’s whawe've’ve gained and what I want to continue. The Tate Modern is full of people who go there to gain some kind of reflection of the time that they live in. It always struck me as amazing that people were happy just to look at the art of the past although it represented values and ideas of people with which they had no contact, and very little understanding of. And when they viewed the things that were created in the context of their own world, they saw it as unintelligible. This has reversed, which is a wonderful development" (M. Craig-Martin, quoted in conversation, Wallpaper, 30 November 2007).