He unzipped his pants and his brains fell out.
I love art. But I love it because it is the expression of a living philosophy. It's the leftovers. Art is what's left over from life.
Art was a last, desperate attempt for me to be able to exist in the world after trying very hard not to exist in the world and realizing that it was just my lot to be a person and to live in the world. See, the normal world dissolves in these experiences, and you realize that it is just an illusion. But, inevitably, I just kept landing back in the middle of it.
It's not "You might as well,"-it's that art was the only option. My last ayahuasca -vision was a very clear vision that I had to go back to the world. I'd been having these extreme jungle-based visions-having my bones cleaned by shaman spirits, being eaten by alligators or consumed by the earth and insects-basically unifying with all things through consumption by jungle creatures. Then my last vision was of getting on a plane and heading back to the West and just dealing with it.
Agendas in general don't work. The agenda is a thing that is perpetually destroyed. But through that destruction, something really interesting comes up.
We had the city trying to demolish two of our exhibition spaces, which was at first pretty disturbing. But following the freak-out is the realization that an attachment to any kind of form is pointless. Forgive me if I seem like a complete nihilist, but if the demolition trucks show up and the buildings come down, then that just presents a new setting in which an artist can work. The real challenge is trying to conceal my delight in the process.
I wouldn't want to be so presumptuous as to suggest what my neighbors should or shouldn't do. Great insights might come out of drug dealing and prostitution. I'm not qualified to say. Not that I would promote those practices. I just respect the complexity of their cultural ecosystem and think it would be pretty lame, not to mention fruitless, to waltz in with some kind of reformative agenda.
I love making money, but you can't live your life waiting to get rich in a job that no longer feeds you artistically.
You can't control how other people see you or think of you. But you have to be comfortable with that.
Never let a crisis go to waste
Success, instead of giving freedom of choice, becomes a way of life. There's no country I've been to where people, when you come into a room and sit down with them, so often ask you, "What do you do?" And, being American, many's the time I've almost asked that question, then realized it's good for my soul not to know. For a while! Just to let the evening wear on and see what I think of this person without knowing what he does and how successful he is, or what a failure. We're ranking everybody every minute of the day.