I feel like I have at least begun to make a contribution, but my most significant concern has to do with whether my actual art will be preserved for future generations or be erased.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Basically everything I've done in art, I was in possession of when I was 20 years old. I use a waste retrieval method of working. I'll go back and use something that disgusted me 15 years ago but that I had enough sense to think about. Some artists change dramatically. I see my work more like history being written.
I think it would be very difficult to maintain one kind of art or whatever for your whole life. I think it's unrealistic.
My art is a form of restoration in terms of my feelings to myself and to others.
You can disseminate your art, and it's all such easy access now. The upside to it is that more people are creating than ever before.
The effort of art is to keep what is interesting in existence, to recreate it in the eternal.
What I am really concerned about is what art is supposed to be - and can become.
There can be nothing exclusive about substantial art. It comes directly out of the heart of the experience of life and thinking about life and living life.
Admittedly, it is really our duty, as artists, to hold up a mirror to our own era; but, on the other hand, these works have lives of their own, and they're still alive today.
I pledge allegiance to the living, and I will defend art from history. I will rescue art from the future, from its attrition into taste, and from the speculative notion that it will become more valuable with time.
What we have as artists is the immortalization opportunity that others don't have, because our work is lasting; it's there forever to view.