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What makes great art great art is

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we, the viewer, 

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we bring as much to it

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as it offers back to us.

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It's what we bring to it

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that really makes these meaningful

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and powerful. 

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Some people say the artist is the first viewer.

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They're the ones who first discover what each work is about.

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So Chiharu Shiota is an artist who's

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been interesting to me. She's been always intriguing

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because her work is very open-ended.

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It deals with themes and ideas that are very universal.

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They're about the struggles we all confront in our lives,

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and I think we approach these works and discover them

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kind of in the same way she does.

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I think the most memorable artworks are artworks that

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I can recall immediately -- 

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I have a mental image of them,

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but I don't have a fixed understanding of what they mean.

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But there are some that I keep coming back to, 

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that I see over and over again, 

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and those works just have meaning

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that's sort of endless. That's like an open door

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to whatever feeling I have on a particular day.

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Some of the recurring traits I think that I find in great artists

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and their works is a kind of, 

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let's call it bottomlessness.

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It has a kind of endless potential to inspire.

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What does a curator actually do? 

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A curator makes choices. 

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That's it. Morning to night, the whole point is

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to see the world of art that's being produced, meet artists,

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to hear their stories, and to say from within those stories, 

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which artists, which works, which collections of works

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drawn together, will speak to the audiences

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that we hope to reach. And for us, 

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it's the audiences of San Francisco. 

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It's our civic responsibility.

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We provide a very open door, 

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and that open door is really for anybody to come in.