I'm very happy to hear that my work inspires writers and painters. It's the most beautiful compliment the greatest reward. Art should always be an exchange.
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.
At the beginning of the 20th century the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music which was then considered as the noblest art.
The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression whether they are paintings sculptures tragedies or musical compositions.
Kinkade's paintings are worthless schmaltz and the lamestream media that love him are wrong. However I'd love to see a museum mount a small show of Kinkade's work. I would like the art world and the wider world to argue about him in public out in the open.
Kinkade estimated that one of his paintings hung in every twenty homes in America. Yet the art world unanimously ignores or reviles him. Me included.
A sad fact of life lately at the Museum of Modern Art is that when it comes to group shows of contemporary painting from the collection the bar has been set pretty low.
It's great that New York has large spaces for art. But the enormous immaculate box has become a dated even oppressive place. Many of these spaces were designed for sprawling installations large paintings and the Relational Aesthetics work of the past fifteen years.
Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you'll find it. It's there in paintings of photographs photographs of advertising sculpture with ready-made objects videos using already-existing film.
It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946 when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.