"I make art because I have to amuse myself".
"I didn't make art, because I didn't find anything compelling," she told me.
Like drugs, "we make art because it makes us feel good", he said to the chuckling crowd.
But he insists that he doesn't primarily enjoy making art because here he's in control.
And when you're young, it's hard to make art because most of them cannot afford a full-time studio".
"I kept making art because I didn't know what else to do, and that's what I've always done," she said.
Vo told me, "I knew I was not going to make art, because to me art was painting, and my painting was terrible.
Arts organisations are, for the most part, putting a brave face on things, working out how to adjust, not wanting to admit there will be any diminution in what they can do; artists like Alexander Kelly will find ways to make art because that is their life's calling.
He's turned down the Tate over BP, but worked for the British Council – "and that's basically propaganda, isn't it?" "A lot of artists I know have stopped making art because they think it's pointless and decadent," he tells me.
It has made it difficult to make judgements of quality and even to make art, because so often the questions asked about it concern the status of the artist, the audience, who funded it, and what it all means symbolically.
