A useful reminder in these troubled times

"But Gonzalez-Torres also firmly believed that all art was political, whether it intended to be or not. He knew that his was, and he believed that for it to be effective, it should not preach or proselytize or even show its hand too fully. "The most successful of all political moves," he once said, "are ones that don't appear to be 'political.' " Such a strategy could be called subversive. Another way to describe it is to say that it worked on many levels: candy as candy; as art object; as a questioning of art objects; as a metaphor for mortality and depletion in the age of AIDS; as a means for his art and ideas literally to be spread, like a virus - or maybe like joy - by everyone who took a piece."