Only in the 20th century, artists started taking the study of perception in a more humane way. They were thinking about the eye as being an instrument, the whole body as being a visual instrument. That sort of gave way a little bit with Cartesian­ - the "Cogito ergo sum" argument. It's not, "I think therefore I exist." It's, "I feel therefore I think therefore I exist."

It's not about fooling somebody, it's actually giving somebody a measure of their own belief: how much you want to be fooled. That's why we pay to go to magic shows and things like that.

A lot of the time you keep looking for beauty, but it is already there. And if you look with a little bit more intention, you see it.

I think there's a gradient that goes from science to art and magic is the middle ground. I think that we're all trying to understand and define the world around us but often it's experimental.

I think I'm an ambitious artist but you have to understand the measure of your influence on people. You're not going to change people's lives with your art. What you do is you give them a little pat so that you change the course of the direction that they're going.

My first reaction to finding Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty in a book was, Wow, what a great photograph! I could not believe that someone had gone to so much trouble just to end up with a picture.

Now that photography is a digital medium, the ghost of painting is coming to haunt it: photography no longer retains a sense of truth. I think that's great, because it frees photography from factuality, the same way photography freed painting from factuality in the mid-nineteenth century.