I'm interested in visual vocabulary, like Andy Warhol was interested in that vocabulary of advertisements and television and pop culture. I do a great deal of tropes. This past decade has seen a new term, "meme," which is exactly what I'm studying.
I really want to do a book on the history of the no-wave music scene in New York, how it extended out and formed lots of other things. It was such a great visual culture.
If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.
The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image.
The culture is eating nature; it's overpowering storytelling. Movies are turning into games - it's abut the image, not nuance.
Look at the walls of Pompeii. That's what got the internet started.
It's a magpie aesthetic: If something is hideous, that's interesting. It's kind of the same sensibility that Andy Warhol had. He was interested in everything and soaked up what he saw like a sponge.
The German ueber-photographer Andreas Gursky was the perfect pre-9/11 artist.
Even more ominous ... is the fact that since the Second World War a new kind of intellectual has emerged in large numbers. ... he is only minimally interested in the proper intellectual significance of images and objects. Such people are not really intellectuals, but visuals ... A visual is more interested in style than in content ... A visual does not feel a rioting crowd being machine-gunned by the police, he simply sees a brilliant news photograph.
Maybe the way we have learned to look has changed in the last 25 years, and the exotic is much more acceptable. There are many artists now, younger artists, who work out of the exotic.
Nothing is really real unless it “happens” on television…Television has brought an inversion of our consciousness. When we take our eyes off the tube, we see things that are not quite authentic – or rather, which gain authenticity only by their resemblance to how things happen on television
Everything I try to do wants to be able to push communication through the notion of the visual image.
In the age of television, image becomes more important than substance.
I think the New Aesthetic is a series of observations. I think most of the trouble people have had with it comes from a misunderstanding of it as a movement.
The force of the advertising word and image dwarfs the power of other literature in the 20th century.
Even with social media and where we are...everything is about the look.
All you see on television are debased images.
Our generation is the most cinematically saturated of all time. Videotapes, DVD's, streaming... Spielberg... all of it has thrust us into an endless loop of consumption.
But I think we're also just talking about the literacy of the audience. The visual literacy of the audience. They've seen so many images now, especially here in the States. There's so much to look at, to watch. So the visual storytelling literacy is harder to impress.
I think we're living, in terms of media, in a very democratic age, but I think that we still look at everything through the lens of 'Vogue' and through our own point of view.
I'm a Banksy fan. I'm also a fan of Chris Hobe, Mister Totem, Drew Wootten, Mad Clout, Hense and Sever, in visual and street art. And Jonathan Mannion and Shane Nash in photography.
Television has tremendous power over our lives.
Part of what is wrong with our society, and hence with ourselves, is that we consume images, we don't produce them. We need to produce, not consume, media.
Every intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which everything he paints in both an homage and a critique, and everything he says is a gloss.
Once you've seen certain things, you can't un-see them, and seeing nothing is as political an act as seeing something.
