Yes, certainly, it’s a form of pleasure, although not always. But I see this as part of my investment in being “on the lookout.” I don’t believe in culture to some extent, but rather I believe in encounters. But these encounters don’t occur with people. People always think that it’s with people that encounters occur, which is why it’s awful… Now, in this, that belongs to the domain of culture, intellectuals, meeting one another, this disgusting practice of conferences, this infamy. So encounters, it’s not between people that they happen, but with things… So I encounter a… painting, yes, or a piece of music, that’s how I understand an encounter.

/…/ This cognitive uncertainty, already more or less apparent since the end of the 1960s, became blindingly obvious in the 1980s, and this had inevitable repercussions on the ideological foundations of politics, with the status quo in force since 1948 coming to a sudden end with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent disappearance of the USSR. The Left, moderate or radical, then retreated in disarray without offering a response of any kind, so that the sheer absence of any alternative ensured the total victory of an obsolete single thought anchored in neoliberalism that was utterly incapable of managing a globalized world of infinite complexity. The outcome of the debacle is, to say the least, unprecedented: an absolute ideological void occupied by a clearly redundant conception of the world,  /../

Sigmar Polke, Paintings, Photographs and Films by Gloria Moure
Ediciones Poligrafa,  2005. page 9