I think people have to be given - or take - the permission to say that something is nothing. Just because it's in a museum doesn't mean it's anything.

When I first came to New York, I knew some painters older than myself. I was kind of the kid who was allowed to hang out with them. That is more the way people talked in those days, it was perfectly normal to question a work's fundamental premises and its fundamental visual manifestations. It was perfectly okay to say, "Oh, that should have been red" or something like that. In a funny way, the way artists talk about art is to de-privilege it.

People talk about this often in the art world. The press releases have reached a level of absurdity and creativity - creative absurdity - that has completely detached from its intended object. It's left reality behind long ago. It's like something out of William Burroughs.

What most paintings do is give you a path for your eye to move around. The painting actually tells your eye, go here, now go here, now go here, go here. So all you have to do is look at it, give it a few seconds, and your eye will start to move through the painting.

I think it's what any artist would want: to feel like their work can be taken in on a level of experience beyond the headline or the press release. I don't think any artist wants to be reduced to a press release. We have a whole industry whose function it is to process and present information. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's not the thing.

For me, art history is like a feather bed - you fall into it and it catches you.

I feel like all the American artists are aesthetically not very interesting and mired in a complaining relationship to its own culture, whereas the Italian work, from a different era, is so comfortable with its relationship to nature and to culture.