The city’s the best gallery I could imagine. I would never have to make a book and then present it to a gallery and let them decide if my work was nice enough to show it to people. I would control it directly with the public in the streets.

JR frames the street as an alternative to the traditional art world’s gatekeeping. By calling the city “the best gallery,” he emphasizes immediacy, scale, and democratic access: art can meet people where they already are rather than requiring institutional permission or a museum-going public. The quote also reflects a shift in authorship and distribution—he rejects the sequence of producing a book or portfolio for curatorial approval and instead claims direct control over presentation, audience, and context. In JR’s practice, this aligns with large-format public interventions that treat urban space as both medium and exhibition site, making visibility and public encounter central to the work’s meaning.