The artist has to be a guardian of the culture.

A lot of us grew up in public. That often means that you have to fail in public too.

As an artist - I'm sure like most creative people - you have a kind of board of directors that you make your work for. It's a group of people that you have, these friends, and you want to know what they think. In a weird way, you're making the work for them.

There are no guidelines for what happens when you get successful as an artist. My heroes were artists like Acconci, and he didn't make any money. That's what I thought success was.

I always imagine that I want to make art that is going to kill you,whether it’s going to do it visually or physically, I’ll take either way.

The ebb and flow as an artist is a bizarre experience, for sure. I was lucky enough to become successful pretty young - in late '79, 1980 - with a body of work that got recognized and became an archetype.

My degree was in sculpture. I always think that drawing is a sculptural process. I always feel like I'm carving the image out rather than painting the image. I'm carving it out with erasers and tools like that. I've always had this fondness for sculpture.

I made a body of work, which was like trying to make movies on a wall and was made up of all different images and materials. I had the aspiration to make movies because I thought that was the cycle. I had this insane egomaniac idea that I could make movies because I made these gigantic art projects.

One of the interesting things I discovered is that in the late 19th century, painters actually had black-and-white copies made of their own paintings. They chose it even over photographs because they knew the photographic medium would distort their work.

The thing that's interesting as you get older as an artist is that the biggest challenge seems to be: how do you stay relevant?

I can't come up with the titles. My wife hates my titles. She doesn't even want to know about them.

It's been like therapy to be able to play music and not embarrass my children too much. They've come to a bunch of the shows. It's kind of cool. I'm glad they like it.

Modern abstract art starts in Russia in about 1915 with Malevich, and then the Russian Revolution happens, and eventually all that experimental art gets squashed and social realism comes back into play. All of a sudden, Malevich is no longer painting black squares he's painting peasants in colorful schmattas.

I'm trying to find answers. It can be quite frustrating, but at the same time, I'm never quite satisfied with what I'm doing, so I'm always looking for the next thing.

I do have great respect for painting, but I am definitely not a painter. I make drawings of paintings, and I'm jealous of painting for sure, but, for me, the paper gives my work a limit.