I think it's possible to allow an artist to go beyond his borders and play.

There is something to be said about laying bare the vocabulary of the aristocratic measure, right? There's something to be said about allowing the powerless to tell their own story.

In America, there's this type of expectation of just-add-water celebrity, this type of, "Of course you found me; we're all going to be famous for 15 minutes," sort of Paris-Hilton-ization of society.

I was 12 in 1989 during perestroika, when my mother found a program that sent me to Russia to study art in the forests outside of Leningrad.

Mel [ Bochner] held large-form meetings with students. But the stronger points came through when we had the one-on-one critiques. And that's the system that works at Yale. There's the group critiques, and then there's the one-on-one critiques that happen in studio.

It's a culture. It's - I mean, people obsess over this. And people create subcultures that identify - and there are people in the streets who will recognize certain patterns and signifiers.

A realization and a dissection of the canon gave rise to the work. But there's also a sneaking suspicion of the canon.