What’s there to say about making paintings?” He looks hard at his son. “My real life, it’s when I’m working. It’s entirely there. The rest—everything—is flimflam. And that’s tragedy. Because what am I really doing? Wiping colors across fabric? Tricking people into feeling something’s there, when it’s nothing? When I’m doing the work, I almost think it adds up. Then they drag me to some farce like tonight, and I’m reminded what my job really is: goddamn decoration.

Maybe we're all ongoing stories, defined at various stages of life, or whenever people oblige us to declare ourselves. Fiction is marvelous for studying this, allowing the writer and reader to leap decades in a sentence. No other art lets you bend time as much.

What the art world has done, it has been constantly been pushing the boundaries about what art can be. It's like expanding its territory.

I don't like most contemporary art. But I think if you talked to any person who's heavily involved in contemporary art, they'd say the same thing. If you go to a biennale, you don't expect to like much of it.