Art is not about objects of high monetary exchange. It's about reasserting our firsthand experience in present time.

Gormley contrasts art’s lived purpose with its treatment as a luxury commodity. By rejecting “objects of high monetary exchange,” he pushes back against a market-driven definition of value and insists that art’s real work happens in perception: it reawakens attention to the body, space, and the immediacy of the present. The phrase “reasserting our firsthand experience” suggests that modern life—mediated by images, institutions, and commerce—can distance us from direct encounter. Art, in this view, is a corrective: it restores sensory and existential awareness, inviting viewers to inhabit time and place more consciously rather than consuming artworks as status symbols or investments.