“In antiquity, around the Mediterranean basin the color blue did not exist. Historian Michel Pastoureau explains that people saw it—the Greeks and Romans were not visually impaired as some historians have suggested—but they did not perceive it as a color, nor did they have a specific word for it. Even the sea and sky, so blue in that part of the globe, looked white, gold, or red to them. For Olafur Eliasson, the 39-year-old Danish installation artist whose main media are light and color, cultural blindness like this is a phenomenon that begs to be investigated.”

—Veronique Vienne, from the article Optical Magic, Metropolis magazine, May 2006.