This work is has always been part and parcel of what constitutes American art. We’re just seeing a lot of it for the first time. 20 years ago, when I was at the Whitney Museum, artists of color and women whose work we’re first seeing now protested because they museums and galleries weren’t willing to show it. What surfaces in the larger institutions is usually what surfaces in the marketplace. What you see at The New Museum is a much more accurate reflection of what’s really happening in the community of artists.

For one thing, the country’s demographics have changed. This is an enormously diverse country, ethnically and racially, especially in the urban centers. It’s natural that second, third and fourth generation children of immigrants would begin to take up skills and seek professional training in areas that their parents didn’t. That means that young people from a variety of backgrounds are now pursuing careers in the arts: as artists, curators and other museum professionals, critics. And the older ones have established themselves in those fields, and have come of age. So there’s bound to be an upsurge in art that deals with the ideas and issues they’re involved with.

But most artists have always been involved with larger issues than the formal (or "aesthetic") qualities of art. And younger people are looking to artists like Bruce Nauman or Leon Golub or Louise Bourgeois, who have established themselves in the marketplace, as role models, because their work has always had an intrinsically social dimension to it.

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All art is inherently political; it doesn’t exist at the outskirts of society

Art doesn’t reflect meaning, it produces it.

Then too, the country has changed and the political climate has changed. Artists don’t like to be told what they should and should not make art about. They generally stand up for others who are attacked or denied support because of the style or content of their work. We live in a period when the Right has increasingly moved to censor what is available to the public; one of the most effective ways of doing that is to deny access to the kind of impartial funding that the NEA provided.

When Patrick Buchanan says "Culture is the Ho Chi Minh trail of power; you surrender that province and you lose America," it’s pretty clear that artists will fight back.

The idea of the melting pot simply proved unworkable. America is a young country, and it’s basically a nation of immigrants. That means multiple and hybrid cultures. No one wants to abandon their own traditions and leap into a melting pot to become part of a single, monolithic culture—even if we could agree on what that culture should be. Anglo-Celtic-American? Afro-Asian-American? Latino-Semitic-American? You’d need too many hyphens to have a country that genuinely represented the cultures of those people who comprised it.

Our attempts to understand and define ourselves are necessarily made in conjunction with attempts to understand and define those who are different, or "other," than we are. The extent to which we see our own experience as the "norm," or the degree to which people exoticize, mythologize and/or marginalize the experience of those of other cultures, races, ages, genders or belief systems is a crucial aspect of the issue of identity.

So people make art in order to better understand themselves and the world we live in, and to communicate through it, to give others access to what might otherwise be unaccessible.

But then, it’s also clear that many people who aren’t white haven’t gotten the same opportunities. If the work doesn’t reflect "our own" experience it’s going to be unfamiliar, or just not as interesting to look at—or show, or buy.

Or else it will be so "other," so different, that it becomes valuable by virtue of its exotic qualities. I like to think about aliens coming to Earth, finding the pine boxes in which we bury our dead to be the most stunningly beautiful and valuable art objects that they can find, and taking them away to their planet to live in perpetuity in their museums, while we’re left down here, bereft, screaming, "That’s my GRANDMOTHER you’ve taken....!!!"

It’s the same paradigm as American dealers and collectors going to Asia or Africa, or to our Native American reservations , finding amazingly "beautiful" burial urns, totems or sacred reliquaries, returning with them, and then being irritated when their owners want them back.

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To my mind, the consequences are ultimately positive. All of us will be able to see more work that helps us to expand our knowledge and understanding of different perspectives. Dialogues might ensue that enforce a climate of listening—in a society which privileges the speaker over the listener almost without exception. Power might become diffused, and questions of civic responsibility substituted. Audiences will change.

The down side? Understanding may not come easy. One culture’s kitsch is another’s most meaningful art form. People who are only interested in what they already know and are familiar with will be seriously threatened, and we’re risk seeing a return to the pre-Civil Rights era. Backlash isn’t pretty. Groups like the Christian Action Network thrive on this stuff; they have a singular agenda, and go after it, with no regard whatsoever for accuracy, much less truth. (When Lynne Cheney was asked how she could lie about something important , her answer was, "Grow up.")

This "material" is contemporary art. It never had a large public because it’s unfamiliar to all but a small group, and it’s also had a bad rap from conservatives. But it stands a fighting chance of expanding its audience if people coming into museums know that there might be something inside that’s relevant to them.

A lot of contemporary art, like the work we show at The New Museum, stands a better chance of engaging the public, because it puts the visitor at the center of the art experience. The idea that the object speaks for itself because of its intrinsic, fixed, qualities is very old-fashioned. Real people respond to objects, or experience them, in very different ways. There’s no one right way, despite what the wall labels might tell you.

Of course there’s didactic and strident work, just like there’s bad abstract painting. But at its best, work with a social dimension gets people to think for themselves, which is extremely pleasurable.

Work that specifically addresses social issues doesn’t have as big a market—except for a few artists. It’s hard to hang a Golub above the couch. But you become used to what has currency. They can "see" a violent Nauman, and respond to its market value rather than confronting its difficult imagery.

Incredible period of change, especially in institutions, and particularly museums, because they’ve been forced to look beyond their own comfort zone—because of it’s social and educational impact.

You can’t have a program that in any way reflects the demographics of the country, artistically, that is, unless you have a staff that’s also representative of the city I live in. I’d rather work in a place that’s diverse, frankly. It’s nice not to see yourself coming and going. It’s wonderful to have a real range of experience and approach. And there’s certainly no shortage of people to choose from, so you can get the highest caliber staff you have the money to hire.

Most museum administrators don’t understand why, for instance, if there’s a show of African art, the African-American "community" won’t necessarily flock to its doors to see it. If you want community involvement, you have to involve the community—at every stage in the planning and development of a given project.

Kinshasha Conwill, former Director of Studio Museum in Harlem, was asked why she didn’t show the work of white artists. Her reply was, "We would, if we could find any who were good enough."