Gilbert & George

Gilbert and George recently sat down with the website The Talks, and although ive always been a fan, one passage i read really made me look at the two artists in a whole new away. This is why reading things is still important!

Do you believe that a true artist has to be poor?

Gilbert: We are still poor.

You probably are not.

Gilbert: We are, very. It’s simple, we only pay ourselves a salary. We have a company and we have a salary where we get very little money, only like forty thousand pounds a year.

And the rest you invest into your art?

Gilbert: The rest we spend making shows. We never have anything left over. We did big shows in China and we paid for it; we did big shows in Russia and we paid for it. We also did a big catalogue that we subsidized for 300 thousand pounds.

So would you say that this freedom from materialism is a conscious personal decision in order to remain flexible?

Gilbert: I mean, why do we need money? We don’t have babies, we don’t have bicycles, we don’t have a car, and we don’t have a mobile phone.

George: We don’t have a holiday house, we don’t have a yacht – we don’t have anything. We need very little for ourselves.