I think there is an element of nihilism about, but I don't think most artists feel their work is meaningless.
Art is man's distinctly human way of fighting death.
Works of art produced in the contemporary world are a further expression of that. But I don't think there is an active, ongoing nihilist self-consciousness in the artist.
Pop art is the inedible raised to the unspeakable.
I think the leaders inevitably express the people they are leading.
It took me fifty years to deal with the Holocaust at all. And I did it in a literary way.