A condensation of the spirit of '68, a movement in which Gerz, a resident of Paris, took an active part, this minimal anarchist gesture did no damage to the monuments, but urged people to see them as instruments of alienation... Jochen Gerz started in the street, the site of both revolution and repression, where life takes place.

Bojana Pejic 1992

Jochen Gerz’s first work for public space also remains among his best known. It counts as the emblematic gesture, the symbolic act that seems most tellingly to express the artist’s attitude... It was in fact in 1968, the year of uprisings and new departures, that he pasted a small sticker with the words Caution Art Corrupts onto Michelangelo’s David in Florence, and thereby laid the cornerstone for creative activities which consciously attempt to stand apart from categories, and which dare to formulate interventions that respect no strict separation of genres. Caution Art Corrupts is a work that addresses art while also extending beyond it: a single sentence, a single gesture, which makes it clear that the conditions for art in the era after 1968 can no longer be retrieved from art alone.

Marion Hohlfeldt 1999

Kann Kunst heute noch folgenreich sein? Attenzione l’arte corrompe warnte Jochen Gerz 1968 mit Aufklebern auf dem David von Michelangelo in Florenz. „Warum korrumpiert sie?“, fragte er 1995 in einem Vortrag vor Studenten in Rhode Island. „Weil ich glaube, dass Kunst Zeit weder darstellt, noch bedeutet, noch provoziert, beinhaltet oder erleidet. Sie schafft die illusion, dass es eine Alternative zur Zeit gibt.“

Angelika Stepken 2006

The David, icon of art history raised high on a pedestal exemplifies, according to Gerz, the superiority of Art and its detachment from human reality. Its height obliges the visitor to gaze upward in the attitude of subjection and passive submission commonly assumed in facing power and dictatorship. But profanation takes place on another level: by "playing" with a small device, the sticker, the artist nullifies the sculpture’s status as copy and makes it an original to all effects, a work of art that belongs to the present, establishes a relationship with the past and opens our eyes to the contemporary. Preference for a public site, for anonymity, for temporality, were to be constant factors in Gerz’s work, indicative of his firm decision to create and collocate his work outside of any institution.

Marcella Anglani 2012