terms of fine art in the U.K., we’ve had a “Brit Art” thing going on, a pop-art thing. It’s all been very sensationalist. It’s what I call post-production art. What does that mean? Basically, you start with a sensation you want to achieve, and then work backwards and plot how to achieve it—in the same way that advertising does. It’s exactly the same. Art these days is like an advertising industry. The point is:
There is nothing really different. There’s nothing really dangerous, there’s nothing really difficult out there right now. And I think we need some things to start galvanizing people. I think we need things that allow people to think in non-commercial ways. Do you feel that you had any failures in your career? Oh, totally. One of my biggest failures was The Face magazine. How do you see that as a failure? Well, the whole message of The Face was that you don’t have to accept conditioned rules. You can go out and challenge things and create new spaces and new expression. How would you view this as a failure? Well, the failure was that people copied it, if you see what I mean. Did they copy it, or were they trying to— No, they copied it, especially in the U.K. It became a copycat culture here. But how do you see that as a failure? Because people missed the message, they just took the stylistic attributes. And it wasn’t about stylistic attributes. It was about the idea that language is organic, that language can evolve as society evolves.
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