If you could live with just one work of art, what would it be?
Rodney Graham’s My Late Early Styles (Part I, The Middle Period), a self-portrait. Like the other works in this series, it revels in quotidian aspiration but is also undercut by his characteristic self-deprecating sense of humour. He once said, “It’s so hard being a conceptual artist when you’ve run out of ideas.”
Which cultural experience changed the way you see the world?
Early-career: at the UBC Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver, where I learned about visual culture and the politics of representation by working alongside Northwest Coast First Nations communities. Mid-career: Tree of Codes, the ballet adaptation by Wayne McGregor with Olafur Eliasson and Jamie xx. Based on a book created as a sculptural object, recast as dance, art and music—incredible. Seeing this probably planted a seed for wanting to find a way to work with Wayne on something that has eventually become his exhibition Infinite Bodies.
Which writer do you return to most?
Brian O’Doherty’s Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space is a book that keeps resurfacing in my work. He captured the changing experience of art from the spectator’s perspective, covering Modernism through the 1980s. While a lot has changed since then, the questions around the experience of art persist, and are very relevant to our experience-driven culture in a late capitalist economy.
What are you watching or listening to?
VFX Artists React by @CorridorCrew on YouTube is a weekly habit of mine. A decade ago, I carried out my Clore Fellowship secondment at [movie special effects company] Industrial Light and Magic, and I think I’m still the only curator to have worked on a Star Wars film!
What is art for?
The fact that it’s tempting to provide a silly answer tells me that I take a lot of pleasure from art. It doesn’t have to be fun or entertaining per se, but it’s deeply fulfilling working with artists to change or shift something about the way people see the world (as a curator), or having my own perspectives challenged or surprised (as a spectator).
• Wayne McGregor: Infinite Bodies, Somerset House, London, 22 February 2026