Tom Sachs.

Unless you're a real genius, like Louis Armstrong, it's hard to have a new idea and a new way of expressing it. The most the rest of us can hope for is to either tell a new story with old tools and words, or an old story with new tools and new words. Once you've solidly established your own language, you can improvise and build new ideas. The power of using brands--in my case, from fashion--and mixing it up with violent iconography lies in merging two things together to form a third. What's important to me about Pop is that using brands and other identifiable, everyday things gives you the opportunity to communicate. You're speaking a common language. I think part of the reason my work with fashion brands in the nineties really took off was because of an anxiety between the rich and everyone else. Another reason was that regardless of whether the work was critical of fashion itself, it still traded on the value of the brand. Like Prada. It's a death camp, but it's a Prada death camp.--AS TOLD TO DAVID RIMANELLI

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