Even if one succeeds in making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, there remains the problem of what to do with a one-eared sow.

Out of sheer perversity, I followed beauty where it lead, into the silence.

If I go to London, everyone wants to talk about Damien Hirst. I'm just not interested in him. Never have been.

I don't think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists.

I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn't lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It's a set of propositions about how things should look.

With the artists, I don't teach, I coach. I can't tell them how to make art. I tell them to make more art. I tell them to get up early and stay up late. I tell them not to quit. I tell them if somebody else is already making their work. My job is to be current with the discourse and not be an asshole. That's all I wanted in a professor.

As my friend Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe has argued persuasively, there is an element of positivity in the visible world, and in color particularly, that totally eludes the historicity of language, with its protocols of absence and polarity. The color red, as an attribute of the world, is always there. It is something other than the absence of yellow and blue--and, thus, when that red becomes less red, it becomes more one or the other. It never exists in a linguistic condition of degradation or excess that must necessarily derive from our expectations.