I think when people struggle with the problem of trying to understand the art world as an idea, they misunderstand it. They think it's a world of visionaries or opportunists. But it also includes people who want to take part in this cultural exercise but don't have the required stuff, they don't have the ideas or the production.

The U.S. has always been a contradiction. It's always been a deeply protectionist, institutional place, where you're not allowed to smoke, and you're not allowed to do this, and you're not allowed to do that. And then, on the other hand, it's completely libertarian in a way. So it's got this weird mixture of being incredibly authoritarian and incredibly open at the same time.

Lying on top of a building, the clouds looked no nearer than when I was lying on the street.

I think when people struggle with the problem of trying to understand the art world as an idea, they misunderstand it. They think it's a world of visionaries or opportunists. But it also includes people who want to take part in this cultural exercise but don't have the required stuff, they don't have the ideas or the production.

The biggest problem for my generation is that people who were born years before us have no concept of us at all. There's a massive gap. I don't know why, but we were really like orphans. Those people competed against us, they hated us and fought for things, and yet they had no interest in our work.

"Contemporary art" for me is a kind of historical term that describes the 40 years between the Berlin Wall going up and then coming down. I'm not sure who will come up with a better term to describe art, but I think contemporary art is actually done for.

I'm operating in the gap between the trajectory of modernity and the trajectory of modernism. So what people think is design is not design, it's my attempt to engage with the trajectory of modernity.