I think there is a lovely conversation between that old idea of art — about precious objects, patronage, history — and the contemporary. With One & Other, what you have in front of the gallery are the waves of real life washing against history.

Nicholas Penny is doing us all a favour by taking up a good heritage position because it needs someone to defend it. However, I’m not against the dialogue that happens when you go out of the classical portico and run into a rastaman doing a performance in front of it.

The silence and contemplation that are necessary for engaging in beauty in all its forms should be contrasted with the street. The livelier the street is, the more the silence of the National Gallery becomes precious.

My feeling is that you have to allow it. It is a bit like a garden: you have to submit to this growth of popular culture in all its forms. I love the way people are skateboarding there. Trafalgar Square has become a living room for London and the National Gallery has become like Aunt Matilda’s cabinet that has a place in it. It is old and precious, but that doesn’t stop us from playing or opening our Christmas presents in front of it.

I’d hate to think that heritage is diminished by the contemporary. For many people, places such as the National Gallery were off-limits. They represented something that they could deal with only in hushed tones, to do with grace and favour. You need background to know what a picture might mean and to access emotional content.

In contemporary art, the viewer’s subjective response is somehow amplified by the work. You don’t need prior knowledge to experience it.

The two need each other and it would be foolish to diminish either to suggest that one has a higher potential value.

One & Other is an attempt to celebrate us now and celebrate potential. The issue that it presents is perhaps we are repositories of collective memory and constructs of a collective future.

The old ideas of culture were hierarchical and exclusive and the courtly language of the art and patronage of the past has rendered viewers as commoners, not party to those silk garments that you see in a van Dyck portrait.

I think the National Gallery is a precious and wonderful institution. It would be sad if it had to find itself fighting the much more inhabited Trafalgar Square. It’s wonderful to see it as a place of protest and celebration.

- Antony Gormley’s One & Other, in which members of the public take turns to stand on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square for an hour, will run 24 hours a day until October 14

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