Don’t be afraid to be a fool. Remember, you cannot be both young and wise. Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it. Because cynics don’t learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us. Cynics always say no. But saying yes begins things. Saying yes is how things grow. Saying yes leads to knowledge. “Yes” is for young people. So for as long as you have the strength to, say yes.

What sets art apart from other technological endeavors is not the innovative use of technology, but a creative misuse of it. To use a tool as it was intended, whether a screwdriver or spreadsheet, is simply to fulfill its potential. By misusing that tool—that is, by peeling off its ideological wrapper and applying it to a purpose or effect that was not its maker’s intention—artists can exploit a technology’s hidden potential in an intelligent and revelatory way.

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube. Viacom’s efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

I’m always buying art books, and they just sit there. Then I grab them in those moments — I just open them to a page, and it’s like a view or something. Something to look at or space out on. With the computer … You don’t space out, because you keep looking for the next thing, so I don’t think you do the same kind of thinking.

A canvas is not a blank surface. It is already heavy with clichés, even if we do not see them. The painter’s work consists in destroying them: the painter must go through a moment when he or she no longer sees anything thanks to a collapse of visual coordinates. That is why I say that painting includes a catastrophe, one that is the crux of the painting.