Richard Wentworth

I get this with my students; they work for months and then suddenly get depressed because they discover Picasso did something similar fifty years ago. We all live in the world. We all participate in the culture. Because you’re in the culture, you have shared the privilege of experiencing an idea. You’re in the swimming pool swimming, and it doesn’t mean you’re not going to proceed — you’ll just proceed at another angle. If we find that someone else has worked in the same area, made the same references, it shows we are on the right track. We will bring our own approach and our own perspective to bear, and it will be honest work. We can’t act as if our area of interest is a country, and we are not going to let anybody else in.

— From interview with James Attlee in “Isolarion”