In art school we're always taught that art is an end in itself - art for art's sake, expressing yourself, and that that's enough.

Everything you do is political, even if it's abstract. You're making a political statement even if it's unwittingly.

By the time I was in my early-twenties and was living there on the Lower East Side, I was so surrounded by tragedy that I think that inspired me to try to reflect it in the artwork.

Art grabs people by their eyeballs, it seduces them ... art is a means to an end rather than simply an end in itself.

Doing art that has a happy ending, that doesn't seem really corny, is extremely difficult to pull off convincingly.

We had collaborated with Allen Ginsberg on one of his last projects just before he died in the spring of '97, a book called Illuminated Poems - it was Allen's poems and songs and I illustrated them. Or, I illuminated them with paintings and drawings that bounced off of them. You want the picture to relate to the text without it slavishly regurgitating it or merely illustrating it, because that's redundant. You want to show another angle of what the text is saying.

Whether it's a street poster on a brick wall, a magazine cover on a newsstand, or animation on a movie screen - art is an effective means of communicating with large numbers of people.