I live in America and American art has influenced me in the sense that the last significant independent art movement in the world was Pop Art, a movement that, to my mind, has become the American national popular art form. I could also mention Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg, they have the artistic talent to turn trash into high art. It was cultural trash - marked as objects of culture, surely, but as objects specifically of popular culture, of low culture. It is, in my opinion, a happy accident that such complex and sophisticated artists became so well-known and so very much in popular demand. This is not, I think, the time for founding artistic schools, but their work has had a real influence on world art and moved America into the forefront of contemporary art.

Leo Tolstoy said that art belongs to the people; in practice, it has turned out that the people do not somehow rise to the level of the artist, but rather that the artist, unwitting or tacitly complicit, has lowered himself to the level of the people.