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For me, the heyday was in 1959. It was before the Ferus Gallery moved across the street, in the days when Ed Kienholz and Walter Hopps ran it. At that time, art was taken very seriously in terms of being an artist, and not as a profession.

I don't think we live in those times when great art comes out of great adversity.

The art market was very different before the mid-1980s: then, art was all about passion, whereas now it's become a commodity.

The forties, seventies, and the nineties, when money was scarce, were great periods, when the art world retracted but it was also reborn.

An interesting thing happened in 1989, right as I was graduating: the stock market crashed and really changed the landscape of the art world in New York. It made the kind of work I was doing interesting to galleries that wouldn't have normally been interested in it.

I think most art comes out of poverty and hard times.

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

When art has changed, it's because the world was changing.

For me, the '60s in the automotive industry was awesome. The cars are heavy, huge, rolling works of art.

That was a wonderful period in my life. I mean, I didn't become an artist, but somebody let me do something I loved. What a luxury, to do something you love to do.