Garrick (00:01.048)
Hello and welcome to this episode of the Curious Advantage podcast. My name is Garret Jones. I'm one of the co -authors of the book Curious Advantage and I'm delighted to be joined today by Sir Michael Craig Martin. Hello Michael.

Michael Craig-Martin (00:27.549)
I'm happy to be joining you.

Garrick (00:29.549)
Thank you. I've been really looking forward to our conversation. I'm going to get straight into it. Your career as an artist has spanned several decades and the focus on your famous paintings and sculptures and printmaking. And you've got this enormous career retrospective coming up at the Royal Academy in London in September, 2024. Can you tell us a little bit about how your journey has led you to where you are today?

Michael Craig-Martin (00:34.272)
Thank you.

Michael Craig-Martin (00:40.663)
Thanks.

Michael Craig-Martin (00:58.806)
Well, that's a very long story, Garrick. I went to art school in America at Yale, and I came to England immediately afterwards. And to be honest, I've never done anything since then, except I've done other things like teaching, but I've always worked as an artist. That's all I've ever done, really, in my whole life.

Michael Craig-Martin (01:26.732)
I feel like I never had a plan for anything that I did. I follow the work and I feel like I am the agent of the work. I just do what it tells me to do.

Garrick (01:43.707)
fascinating and I want to explore that a little bit later for sure but just back to this lifetime retrospective you are putting all of this together for the Royal Academy it's opening in September which is not that far off from where we are today in August and you're also I'm aware compiling several books to accompany the exhibition this must have given you an amazing opportunity to review the entire arc of your career

Michael Craig-Martin (01:45.932)
Thank you.

Yeah.

Garrick (02:13.61)
What are some of the highlights or some of the things you've experienced through this process?

Michael Craig-Martin (02:14.272)
Yeah.

Michael Craig-Martin (02:19.628)
Thanks.

Well, it's an incredible privilege to be doing an exhibition of this scale at this time of my career and to go back and go through virtually everything I've done.

and try to make a selection of things that trace the course of the work. It's a retrospective in a truly chronological sense. does, one thing leads to another. So that somebody who maybe only knows my work of the last 10 or 20 years would be able to follow the path about how I got here from where I started. And it is a path and it does lead quite logically

in retrospect to where I am.

Garrick (03:12.601)
I that's amazing considering what you said earlier about how you've always followed the work and let the work, can you give us a sense of how that works for you? What does it mean to follow the work and to allow it to lead you on this journey?

Michael Craig-Martin (03:27.68)
Well, work comes from work. It doesn't come from inspiration or other considerations really. When one's working, as one's working, things come to you through the work itself and that tells you what to do next.

that shows you what the opportunities are. And sometimes it's very small thing and it's a simple thing, and other times it is actually an insight. But it only comes because you happen to be there in the work at that moment, and then it opens a door. Every time I have thought that my work had reached an ending and that I thought, my God, I'm finished.

amazingly, just at that moment another door opens up and it's always a good idea when a door opens to go through it.

Garrick (04:25.976)
That's fascinating. Can you tell me a little bit, can you give us an example? Can you think of some of those doors that may have opened

Michael Craig-Martin (04:35.817)
Well, there's one very recent one, which is quite extraordinary. When I was offered to do the retrospective at the Royal Academy, I was asked if I would do an immersive digital work, which is a very contemporary thing to do. I've never done one before.

Michael Craig-Martin (05:02.452)
I said yes, because I always say yes. And it's turned into something just extraordinary. I'm still working on it. It won't be finished until the end of August, and the show opens in September. It's one, I think it could be one of the most important things I've ever done. And if it hadn't been that I was asked to do it, I wouldn't have done it. The work, came from what was happening. I just followed what was there.

Garrick (05:32.352)
You know, your digital art, I'd like to talk about a little bit. Not everyone may be aware, but you have a remarkable body of digital work, particularly your digital portraits, which are among my personal favorites. Many notable figures have been captured in your portraits. And just to describe one, it's sort of a screen on which one of your famous colored images of the person

in a frame, but the colors change continuously and infinitely. So each one is an algorithm pretty much that constantly shifts and creates an ever changing display on the screen. I find them compelling. There's an amazing one by Laura Burlington, which I really like. And you began this series well before NFTs and digital became popular. And to my mind, these are some of the first really

digitally generated artworks. don't know what others think, but they've always grabbed me as being so ahead of the game. So when you say you've entered a door into this kind of immersive art, I'd like to talk more about that. But to talk about your digital portraits, what got you to that point? What inspired those concepts?

Michael Craig-Martin (06:54.17)
Well, I had already done some earlier digital works involving groups of objects and what I did was either they slowly changed color or

would fade and disappear and then reappear. So that basically what you're looking at was a live situation.

Garrick (07:27.282)
you want to say basically what you're looking at is the live situation

Michael Craig-Martin (07:31.436)
I feel I've lost you. I can't see you anymore. I don't know when the phone rang.

Garrick (07:34.481)
to...

Can you hear me? Let's have a

Michael Craig-Martin (07:41.938)
I can hear you, I can't see you.

Garrick (07:44.744)
What about if you click on the on the riverside thing?

Michael Craig-Martin (07:50.097)
Yeah, now I can't find

Jessica (Producer) (07:54.152)
has another window popped

Michael Craig-Martin (07:59.39)
I don't know. That was so weird. here you are. Now you're back. Now you're back. We're back where we were. Sorry about that. You asked the question again.

Garrick (08:05.127)
There we go.

Yes, and the question is about how did you come to these digital portraits? What enabled you to open that door?

Michael Craig-Martin (08:11.702)
Yes. Over.

Michael Craig-Martin (08:22.843)
Well, I had been doing early in the 90s, was in the 2000s, I was doing

Michael Craig-Martin (08:31.628)
very small monitors with a live computer where there were images of objects, like a group of objects, maybe 10 objects, which would either change color or fade and disappear and then reappear. The thing that was special about them was that they weren't recording. It wasn't a video. The computer was live and the computer had a program

made it, gave it the opportunity to decide what color, how long the color would appear, what would be the next color, which essentially meant that what you were looking at was constantly changing, and you almost never saw the same thing again. Yet by the time you did, you would have forgotten. And so, I then was asked to do a portrait for the National Gallery, and I had never done a portrait or anything like that.

But when I was told that it was Zaha Hadid, I thought, well, she's such a fascinating person, I immediately said yes. And I started to try to paint a portrait of her, and it was unsatisfactory. And then I suddenly thought, well, if I did the same thing of having the features of the face constantly but very, very slowly change color.

and to do it live is like having, it's like a living person, it's like having the moods. It takes on a psychological meaning when you have the face change in color. So it just seems so ideally suited to the question of a portrait, and that's where they came from.

Garrick (10:12.057)
I love those so much. Now, I don't know how much you can tell us about what you're doing at the RA with this state of the art immersive technology, but can you give us a little hint or some insight into what we can expect and what's coming?

Michael Craig-Martin (10:30.976)
Yes, well, when I was first asked, I really didn't have any idea about what to do, and I was trying to look back at things I'd already done to see if there was something that I could adapt to that situation. And then something struck me that...

Michael Craig-Martin (10:52.108)
which would be to use hundreds and hundreds of images. I've been drawing images of objects in the same way since 1978, and I have hundreds of them. And so I decided to take a large number of them. It turned out to be around 300. I then adapted them to the digital format. And...

an engineer who I have a technician who I've worked with over all these years and I said well here are 300 images what can I do and then he showed me what the technology could do and I have to say it's it's blown my mind and I'm hoping that it will have the same effect on others.

Garrick (11:42.261)
It's incredible talking to you about your process and how you follow the art and so on. just to turn to you, were a teacher at Goldsmiths for many years, but you taught many of the UK's most celebrated contemporary artists, including Damien Hirst and the YBAs or the Young British Artists as they became known. And just to talk about that, what was it about the YBAs that made such a significant impact on the UK back then, both culturally

economically, I

Michael Craig-Martin (12:15.336)
A lot of what has to do with success is to do with luck. There's a degree of timing. If you get your timing right, it can mean everything. And something happened in the end of the 80s when I was teaching at Grossman's. I'd been teaching since the 60s. But suddenly I was aware that I was teaching. I hadn't.

a lot of very, very talented students. More than, and they were connected in some way. They were very aware of each other. They were jealous of each other. They were interested in each other. And there was a chemistry between them which I had not experienced before.

So, and there was a moment when they were very young, they were very ambitious, and they weren't prepared to wait for somebody to offer them something. They kind of took the idea of being an artist into their own hands at the age of 21, 22, 23. And it just happened, that was a moment when the art world was prepared to accept that.

And so out of all of those elements came this kind of flowering of something in the 90s. to be honest, I look at, because I've known British art education for so long, it took several generations to produce what happened across all the arts in the 90s. Things that look like they happened overnight never happened overnight. It's just that you haven't realized what was going on in the background.

And it took two or three generations to get there and flowers in a very big way in the 90s.

Garrick (14:05.774)
Yeah. When they say after 20 years of hard work, you might be an overnight success.

Michael Craig-Martin (14:13.676)
Exactly. There couldn't be more. I'm the perfect example. I'm 83.

Garrick (14:19.853)
You've been outspoken on the need for art education and its impact on society and the economy. Can you talk a little bit more about why you believe it's so important?

Michael Craig-Martin (14:36.138)
I think that the arts are really quite different from other things and it's one of reasons why people with very little imagination are very suspicious of them. It's because unlike many other aspects of life, they are fundamentally based in the pleasure of doing something.

You can't do the arts if they don't give you pleasure. There's no reason for doing them. The reason you paint is because it gives you pleasure. The reason you play a musical instrument is because it's not just a career move. It's not just a way of making money. It's not just a way of doing something else. You can't sustain self -generating engagement without pleasure.

And in a world where so much of education is based on a sense that being miserable with it and having to be forced to do things is the proper way to learn, it upsets a lot of people to think that you can do something worthwhile based on the pleasure of doing it. And it's so important for people, everybody to learn because the fact is, if you can understand that,

the value of that, you can bring that to every activity you do, no matter whether it's art or

Garrick (16:02.474)
It's interesting you talk about pleasure being this driver and its impact on us individually. What about things we're afraid of and the relationship between that exploration and pleasure and fear, for example, opening a door, going through it, we might be afraid. How does that relate to giving us pleasure and motivating

Michael Craig-Martin (16:18.454)
Yeah.

Michael Craig-Martin (16:29.069)
Well, I think, you know, basically people are fundamentally conservative. We are all cautious about the unknown and, you know, I often have people say to me, I'm really interested in seeing something new.

But the reality is that when they are presented with something new, they reject it because it's either unnerving in some way, or the very fact that it's new. What it means by new is that you don't already have in place the parameters by which to understand or appreciate something. Everything I've ever done that was new in my work has been cautiously received the first

and much more enthusiastically received the second time. And that's because there's a degree of familiarity that's been created.

Garrick (17:23.001)
Amazing.

Garrick (17:28.9)
Why do you think artists are so important to society? Why do you think society needs to have artists?

Michael Craig-Martin (17:41.229)
I think the role of the artist is as an observer. To me, the most interesting art comes from observation. Observation can take many forms, but it's to do with being able to reflect back on what it is that

that the world gives us. And everybody has a different take on this. Everything that's special about every individual person is the thing that is basically where they are an artist. Because it's your individuality and your individual perception of things that makes you who you are. one of the problems in life, one of the problems of many people who wish to be artists is that if, that what comes naturally to

when often under values because it seems easy, because it seems natural. And you assume that it's natural to you, then it must be natural to everybody. When in fact, it's nearly always that makes you different from everybody else. And everybody else is quite surprised that you could do this and they can't.

Garrick (18:44.802)
Mm -hmm.

Garrick (18:51.723)
Yeah.

Garrick (18:57.091)
I'm going to do the intro.

Garrick (19:01.997)
So we told, here we go.

Michael Craig-Martin (19:04.438)
you

Garrick (19:06.722)
So we're talking to Sir Michael Craig -Martin. Michael was born in Dublin in 1941. He grew up in the United States where he studied fine art at Yale and he's been based in Britain since 1966. Mostly as a teacher at Goldsmiths. And his first solo exhibition was at the Rome Gallery in 1969. And he's very well known for a piece called An Oak Tree, 1973, which I'd also like to talk about.

He has black and white wall drawings, vibrant paintings and installations. Notable commissions include the European Investment Bank in Luxembourg, University of Oxford, Le Ban, Down Center in London, HEI, Gerling headquarters in Hanover. But over the past four decades, he's exhibited globally at venues such as the Centre Pompidou in Paris, MoMA in New York, various Kunstvereins in Germany,

Michael Craig-Martin (19:55.69)
Thank

Re

Garrick (20:04.577)
He represented Britain in 23rd Sao Paulo Biennial and had retrospectives at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1989, the Irish Museum of Modern Art 2006, Serpentine Gallery 2015 and Seoul Korea in 2022. Recent exhibitions include Less is Still More, at Creffield Museum House Estes, Sculpture at Chatsworth House, Now, a touring exhibition in China and a

Michael Craig-Martin (20:19.429)
you

Garrick (20:34.047)
at the Soul Arts Centre. A notable teacher at Goldsmiths College London, Craig -Martin was a Tate Trustee from 1989 to 1999, who was ordered a CBE in 2000, a Royal Acropedition, I can't say that, elected a Royal Acro -de -mission, my God, elected

Michael Craig-Martin (20:36.752)
Okay.

Michael Craig-Martin (20:54.208)
you

Garrick (21:02.206)
a Royal Academician in 2006 and was knighted in 2016 for his services to art. Michael, one of the things that strikes me is you have a one of your titles was Less is Still More and I remember Andy Warhol's quote where he was saying always leave them wanting less. Why did you choose Less is Still More for your exhibition title?

Michael Craig-Martin (21:06.624)
course.

Thank

Michael Craig-Martin (21:31.084)
Well, of course, the exhibition was in House Estes, which is a very early house designed by Mies van der Rohe, who is famous for the idea of less is more. there's a way in which...

Michael Craig-Martin (21:50.676)
Less is More has a strange kind of fashionability. It comes in and out of fashion. And when I did the exhibition, I thought that the idea of Less is More was slipping away, but I wanted to remind people it was still an operative idea, and it still worked.

Garrick (22:08.261)
Do still believe that?

Michael Craig-Martin (22:12.119)
Yes,

I'm not a minimalist, but I do think it's very important that one of the lessons from minimalism is that absolutely everything matters. Everything counts. There's nothing that's beneath contempt. There's nothing that one shouldn't pay attention to. You need to give your attention to every detail of everything. Everything deserves its place.

Garrick (22:43.513)
Certainly less is certainly not more when it comes to your distinctive colors and your works and your sculptures like reliefs of light bulbs and spades and a shoe and the fountain pen at the University of Oxford. You always use these everyday objects. What is it about these kind of everyday objects that you find so compelling?

Michael Craig-Martin (22:55.98)
Thank you.

Michael Craig-Martin (23:10.904)
To be honest, don't it's been in my work soon from the very beginning and I don't truly know why I don't really have a clear sense of Of the reason for that Except going back to my childhood. I'm aware that from very very young age. I was very visual my interests everything about the visual world fascinated me

and whether it was objects or artworks or places, virtually anything. The focus of my attention was always on what was visual. The other thing was, again, from a very early age, I was fascinated by that which was modern and contemporary. And I grew up in the late 40s and the early 50s when what we see now is the modern

was really being created. The world we live in today started in the post -war period. And I feel like I was there when the roots of how the world looks today were being laid. And I was fascinated by

Garrick (24:25.585)
It's It's a curiosity really that comes to mind of course. Can we talk about artists and the practice of art and curiosity? We have to a little bit, but what is your take on curiosity? How we can all cultivate it successfully?

Michael Craig-Martin (24:44.394)
Well, curiosity seems to me to be at the root of everything that I do. I consider that I can only do something if I'm curious about it, and my curiosity is based on the fact that it contains something I don't yet know, I don't quite understand yet. It's not interesting to do something where one knows everything about it.

And it's one of the things, I see it very clearly looking at my retrospective. The work I've done in the 70s is different than the 80s and the 80s is different than the 90s. In a purely practical sense, I could do again the work from those different decades.

Physically, it's potentially possible, but psychologically it's absolutely out of the question. I could not possibly do the work of that time. It came from what was curious to me at that moment. And when the curiosity goes out of it, the ability to actually do it disappears.

Garrick (26:00.964)
That's it. When the curiosity goes out of it, the ability to do it disappears. That's fascinating to me from a psychological perspective because there's so many ways to approach curiosity. One is, want to know about something. You choose the topic and then you find out how you can get there by meeting people or exploring or researching or learning something or putting on an exhibition or show.

you kind of working towards a target. Whereas the other way of doing it is from what you're talking about, how you found it in the work and how the work instructs you. You just start doing something and through that process of making, you become curious about something out as you put it another door opens. It's amazing to me that curiosity can be led by simply doing and simply being engaged with doing something.

rather than having a specific target to achieve

Michael Craig-Martin (27:03.948)
Yes, feel, that is interesting because I don't feel like I've ever worked to a target. I haven't had an agenda. If you had told me when I made the first drawings of objects in 1978 that these long years later, I'd still be making drawings of objects in exactly the same way.

I'd have thought you were nuts. I mean, it would never have occurred to me that it could give me a path that was so long, astonishing.

Garrick (27:42.518)
And your sort of art career took off after you retired. Is that right? I mean, you were known as an artist before that as you were teaching and so on, but it sort of went stratospheric after you retired.

Michael Craig-Martin (27:56.236)
Well, I I taught for, as many artists of my generation did, as a way of making a living that kept you close to art when I couldn't make any money from my work and certainly not enough to live on. The ironic thing is that the year that I first felt able to stop teaching,

because I was making enough money from what I did that I quit, because that had always been my intention, was in 1988, which was exactly the year that Damien did Freeze and my teaching became famous, was exactly the year I stopped. so, but life is full of these ironies. I mean, I feel like...

I really, during the period when I was teaching, I did half the week work teaching and the other half of the week was devoted to my work. I, if there's a period in one's life as an artist when one makes sacrifices, for me that was that time. I didn't take a vacation for 20 years because I needed that time for my work.

And I could never be in the situation that I am in today if during the years that I was teaching I stopped working. If I hadn't kept working during those years, I would, and that's what the retrospectives will help us show, all the work that was done during all the years I was teaching. of course, that was also because then when I stopped teaching,

Well, I'm familiar with working six or seven days a week, so I just could, so I did more because I had more time. and there's no doubt about it, it makes me nervous not to have to teach. And I'm very, I was very, very lucky that I was able to stop. But I greatly enjoyed it when I was doing it, but I was teaching at a period that was a kind of golden age of art education in Britain.

Garrick (29:51.858)
Amazing.

Garrick (30:14.029)
I hope it comes back. I I think it's important artists, as you say, not only to reflect, but also to challenge us, to make us think about things that we take for granted in new ways.

Michael Craig-Martin (30:23.658)
Yes.

Michael Craig-Martin (30:27.212)
I also think there's interesting about, you know, I think of the YBAs, it's a kind of terrible term, YBA, but young British artists, but the fact is they were all very, very British. There's a kind of attitude in them that is not, it's not American and it's not European in the continental sense. It is something a bit different.

And there is, one of the ironies, again, about Britain is that in some ways it's the most skeptical country about anything new, about the arts, about, and yet.

It's a kind of cultural powerhouse. It's a creative powerhouse that produces an unlikely number of highly creative people in many different fields at the same time as barely valuing it. It doesn't value it properly.

Garrick (31:25.22)
So talk about innovation and the realization you talk about other spheres, you think about the film world and the incredible film education we have in this country. And then people have to go abroad in order to find work. It's all over books, literature, yeah, academic.

Michael Craig-Martin (31:43.788)
This is true of everything. To be an artist in Britain, if you don't have success abroad, you're never going to be a successful artist in Britain.

Garrick (31:54.947)
And then you get the success abroad. Does the success abroad mean you eventually become respected back home possibly?

Michael Craig-Martin (31:57.226)
nor will you ever make a living.

Michael Craig-Martin (32:08.094)
It's, yes, it's suddenly it starts to dawn on people back home.

Garrick (32:12.503)
Yeah, I'm curious, sorry.

Michael Craig-Martin (32:14.028)
But the roots of that is so much in Britain. I mean, it's very striking, very, very striking about how important, and I think that goes, some of that is to do with the nature of the British educational system as it has existed. It's been under terrible pressure and damage over the last 20 years and more.

In essence, it's a system that works creatively.

Garrick (32:49.965)
What do mean by that? It works creatively.

Michael Craig-Martin (32:57.393)
The essence, as I am, in my experience of British education, is that it leaves a great deal of responsibility in the hands of the individual student. It's not nearly as prescriptive as education in most other places. You have to take responsibility, certainly through an art education, you have to take responsibility for yourself, you have to be self -motivated, you...

there's lots of ways in which you are an independent operator within the educational system and it gives you whatever you put into it in a very particular way, but it does allow you an unusual degree of individual freedom if you use it properly. And that makes it quite unique as an educational system.

Garrick (33:52.489)
That's right. I remember coming to university here being kind of shocked by how much responsibility was put on my hands and also responsibility for putting my own kind of curriculum together. And those of my friends, we could choose so many options, even if it meant late night lectures or so on. You could kind of thread your way through what you wanted. It wasn't prescribed in that way. It taught me a lot about individual desire and motivation and if that it's up to you.

fundamentally and that I think does breed some reflection that must breed a kind of creativity as you say, got to get on with it so much. Just getting on with it. I'm curious about the development of things like artificial intelligence. For example, do you have a view on artificial intelligence and I'll load it a little bit. know, artificial intelligence is now generating imagery.

Michael Craig-Martin (34:24.331)
Thank you.

Michael Craig-Martin (34:36.46)
Yeah.

Garrick (34:52.064)
and it's very obvious when things are artificially generated these days but they're very complex ideas. mean do you have a view on artificial intelligence whatever that is and specifically the kind of this rapid generation of images?

Michael Craig-Martin (35:06.354)
Thank

Michael Craig-Martin (35:13.353)
I don't really have a proper view of artificial intelligence, partly because I don't fully understand it and also I haven't had direct engagement personally with it. But there's one thing I would say, art is not just images. You can have images that are not art.

Just making images does not mean you're making art. There are even artists who make images, which I don't think are art. So the idea that some artificial beings could do the same thing. One of the things that I feel very aware of is the arts are essentially...

Garrick (35:45.679)
you

Michael Craig-Martin (36:04.018)
as I was speaking about pleasure, they're based in emotion. They're not, they're fundamental essences, not in a kind of academic intelligence. It's one of the reasons I think why very often academically educated people find the arts quite difficult is because it doesn't conform to academic standards. Because it's not based intellectually, it's based emotionally.

And I'm, who am I to know, but is it really possible for a machine to fake human emotion? When I look at somebody's work that I find that I'm moved by, I'm entering their sensibility, their world. They've offered it to me and

responding to it, it strikes a chord with me and I'm sharing something of their feeling through the work. Could I do that with a work made by a machine imitating a human emotion? I don't know.

Garrick (37:20.811)
Hmm. Fascinating. I have to ask you, what are you personally most curious about right now? I mean, beyond your RA exhibition and all of that. do you have time to be personally curious?

Michael Craig-Martin (37:26.995)
So.

Michael Craig-Martin (37:37.676)
How long am I going to It becomes an issue. I feel very fortunate

Michael Craig-Martin (38:10.099)
be able to stay, hopefully, engaged in the world

It's difficult to, know, the thing about young people is they are effortlessly engaged in the world.

anybody who deals with students knows, that's one of reasons, that's one of the things, that's one of the great positive things about being a teacher is to be engaged with students because if you want to understand the world, you're much more likely to understand it through them than they are through you.

Garrick (39:00.5)
sorry, I think it just dropped. you said something about being curious about how long you're going to live. I don't mean to be dark here at all. But what does it mean for you? mean, at 83, how does that change your perspective or what do do? What advice do you have for us?

considering age and being older and what should we pay attention to?

Michael Craig-Martin (39:40.054)
Well, I mean, I think, you know, if the very basic simple things, you only get one life. I think one has to do the best one can to make the best of it. Given what you're given, if you're not born a genius, you're never going to become one. You are who you

Garrick (40:03.97)
it

Michael Craig-Martin (40:05.036)
You have what you have and you live by what you've been given. But there are definitely people who make the best of it better than others and that seems very important to me. The other thing is, I mean a lesson from my own life, I've been very, very persistent. In a way, I've never had a major big moment of success.

What I've done was never totally fashionable or part of something bigger that brought me a lot of attention. But I've always been, ever since my first show, I've always been here, I've always been working, I've done, I've persisted. And amazingly, here I am at my age and I'm having the biggest moment of my career is coming.

when really it should have, you know, it's coming right at the end of my career, towards the end. And so, I mean, I'm very glad that I didn't have my big moment when I was 30. When I was 30, I was really pissed off I didn't have it. But now, I think, thank goodness, I'm happy I have it now. And I certainly appreciate

happening.

Garrick (41:25.388)
I can't wait to be 83 and I do hope I have half as much energy as you do and attitude towards life. I really do. If there's one thing to leave everybody with one idea, what would it

Michael Craig-Martin (41:45.782)
Well, it's obvious that the world is in a lot of trouble in a lot of ways. I think it's very important to remember that, these days it seems easy to forget, my experience of life is that essentially people are in general really nice. People would much rather be good people than bad people. People would much rather behave well than behave badly.

Most people do. And one shouldn't lose faith in the idea of the essential goodness of life and of people in it.

Garrick (42:32.585)
Thank you so much for joining us, Michael. That's a pretty amazing way to end it, I think. I wish you all the best for your exhibition in September. And thank you for talking with us today. We've covered a lot of territory from, you know, curiosity and how to approach the work and allowing the work to drive the work and open doors. Don't be afraid to go through the doors and allow them to take you places.

Michael Craig-Martin (42:45.202)
you

Garrick (43:02.89)
all the way through to your digital work and some of the groundbreaking stuff you're working with now. But thank you so much for talking with us today. Very much appreciated.

Michael Craig-Martin (43:09.663)
Yeah.

Michael Craig-Martin (43:17.638)
It's been a pleasure talking to you, Garrick, and thank you for the opportunity.

Garrick (43:24.116)
You've been listening to a curious advantage podcast where we've been talking with Michael Craig -Martin. This series is about how individuals and organizations use the power of curiosity to drive success in their lives and businesses, especially in the context of our new digital reality. It brings to life the latest understandings from neuroscience, anthropology, art, history, business and behaviorism about curiosity and makes these useful for everyone. We're curious to hear from you.

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