"There’s nothing sillier than an M.F.A. What does it mean? Did you learn anything? No. To be a master you have to learn languages and you have to have these things. Nobody gets them. I don’t think the art form is so complicated that you need a college course in order to read it. I really don’t. Art and fashion are the last two bastions where the product itself is what attracts attention; it really doesn’t much matter who made it. There’s this legitimization of something with an M.F.A. But Gaultier draws a shoe, they look at it, they put the shoe in production, it comes out, and it works. Nobody had to know anything about the person. Art is the same thing, something is built and shown, and it enters the culture. I like schools, I like people to go to school, but the purpose of the Academy is to give answers. If they don’t have an answer, they give a solution. The purpose of art is to ask questions. They’re antithetical.

I wouldn’t tell a young person what to do. They’d have to figure out their aspirations, why they are making art, and they’d have to surprise me. How do you relate to people what it was like in the late sixties and the seventies, that there was a brutal war going on that did affect everybody, not just soldiers, in the United States? There was a whole different ball game going on. How do you tell somebody what they’re supposed to do? And how do I know why somebody else is making art? Sorry, I don’t have a pronouncement. I wish I did. Wisdom does not come with age. Skills come with age, but wisdom, I doubt it very, very much."