I was brought up Catholic, and I felt the power of art from a very young age – seeing the brutality of all those images of flayed apostles and tortured saints was a pretty strong introduction.
I don’t think I’d want my pet in formaldehyde, but I guess in America they would.
If the choice is between buying another building or a Pollock, I’d go for the Pollock every time.
Commercials are so contemporary and up to date that when you’re involved in that visual world, you can’t really go backwards.
I mean, people listen to music, and they like that, but I think in England, a lot of people don’t like contemporary art.
You’ve got to be able to copy things faithfully before you can deviate.
I just hope that I can be kind of like the Beatles. I really like that kind of model. I like the way that without losing integrity they could change through fashion and not look back at the ’60s and vomit when they saw what they’d done.
I just do what everybody asks me to do, in terms of media and stuff.
When you’ve just done it, you’re not sure. But when you’ve sat with it for a couple of hours and you don’t want to do anything more to it, that’s a great feeling. It can stand on its own two feet.
But then architects don’t build their own houses.
I have titles floating around in my head; I have sculptures floating around in my head. It’s like a collage.
What I really like is minimum effort for maximum effect.
I love art. It is uplifting.
For me, art is always a kind of theater. When I started the spot paintings I made them as an endless series. But I was never serious about it being an endless series. It was just an implied endless series. The theater means you just have to make it look good for that moment in the spotlight.
I always try to make everyone mellow down, make sure everybody’s happy. The people I have employed have always kind of stayed with us. A lot of people who come to work for you are artists in their own right. And they want to work for you because they want to pick something up.
I quite like it to be risky. I’m not ready to sit down in a chair with my name on it yet. I’ve arrived at that point in the art world where there really is a chair that you sit in.
You’ve got to be oblivious to other people, the push and pull of other people’s opinions, the way other people measure success. It’s then that you realize you are 100 percent who you are and you have to use that who-you-are 100 percent in order to create great things.
For artists it’s a lot easier to make art in bad times than it is in good times. When you’ve got no money it’s easy to just drink your way through it and make great art. But if you’re making lots of money it can be very problematic.
I’ve never learned to drive because I get lots of ideas when I’m a passenger in a car. I love to get in a car with a driver and just think and work things out.
I definitely think about death. And every day your relationship with death changes. And every day I sort of feel like I know it more. I’ve always thought about it.
Death’s just something that inspires me, not something that pulls me down. I used to get called morbid at school. I have always loved horror films; I like being frightened.