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.

It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn't understand, you'd have some obligation to guess. Now you don't.

I hate all that woozy political and psychotherapeutic crap applied to books and art.

Where do you learn how to act? Not at church. America is a lot more like pagan Rome than we think. We still sacrifice to objects to gain our social goals.

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.

In my experience, you always think you know what you're doing; you always think you can explain, but you always discover, years later, that you didn't and you couldn't. This leads me to suspect that the principal function of human reason is to rationalize what your lizard brain demands of you. That's my idea.