“To anyone in the art world who wants to get out I am inclined to say: perhaps you’re in the wrong place. On a more fundamental level, however, the problem with public declarations of one’s longing for ‘leaving art’ – the title, incidentally, of a collection of essays by Suzanne Lacy published in 2010 – is that they necessarily presuppose an antinomy between art and what is invariably referred to as the ‘real world’ (or worse, ‘real life’), and that one is better than the other because it has us believe that it is more real. Anyone who believes that art is not part of the real world – that one can only enter the latter on condition of leaving the former – should be forgiven for wanting to leave art behind, because he or she is clearly wedded to the wrong notion of art, one that is pathologically disconnected from the real world. If, that is, we agree with their presupposition: that this world supposedly ‘out there’, free of all things art, is indeed the real one.”

+ Can I Go Now?: Trying to leave the art world (Frieze)