There seems to me to be a very particular attitude towards being an artist, and towards looking at art, reflected in the quotes here. This line from Brancusi for example, “The moment you are no longer a child, you are already dead,” suggests a fatalistic attitude.

You think it’s fatalistic? Y’know Dylan also said, “He not busy being born is busy dying.” It’s not fatalistic in the sense of the depressing kind of fact. It’s just truth. It’s an essential. Western culture has been very bad at accepting it. I’m not religious, and neither was Brett, but I do believe in creativity, and I believe in special people that have the ability to do whatever they do particularly well. The rest of it is just decoration, just coloring in.

There are way too many people calling themselves artists. It’s a very heavily abused word these days. I suppose we grew up in the era where our parents thought that if you wanted to be an artist then you had to starve in a garret for 20 years, and then you’d be discovered, if you were lucky. It wasn’t considered then to be a particularly safe thing to do. You had to be a bit of a wild child to insist on it, or be born to parents that were willing to support you financially. This is all without going to art school, or growing up safely in a bureaucratic environment. Jumping in the deep end was very much something to do with the 60s, and a lot of the time we made big mistakes, and some of us survived them. We experimented with everything, including drugs.