PETER BRANT

PB: You really have to be looking 15 or 20 years from now because an artist should be that much ahead of his time to forecast something aesthetically, politically or culturally…For instance, one of the earliest pictures that I bought was [Andy Warhol’s] Shot Blue Marilyn. Today that is like looking at the Mona Lisa. Marilyn Monroe has a totally different image than she had in 1964 when she passed away. It’s like Elton John’s song. We’ve looked at her life in retrospect since then and what Andy Warhol projected is something that now is very accurate—but nobody knew it at the time. The art world cognoscenti thought that picture was garish and photographic. It was not considered beautiful and not embraced by the art world…But that’s what Andy did, he was the radical artist at that time.

To me it’s about looking at something visually or conceptually that is really going to change your view, something that is going to set a new aesthetic because of what it means culturally. Then it will become socialised and become beautiful. But it has to have some importance, some angst that changes your life in some sense. It has to be troublesome in some way.

-The Art Newspaper
April 2009