Interview: Artist Richard Phillips On Painting Celebrities, NYC's Art World & His Distinctly Evocative Paintings

It was something I was thinking about when I considered Marina Abramovic's "The Artist is Present." The famous artist and famous museum heighten it, but the main experience could have been had anywhere, with anyone.

I think so, I think that its an important point. I think there are such instances of doubt, and it should spark a conversation. There's no guarantee that there is going to be art present when you really set it up to be. I mean you can set it up in the greatest institutions in the world and maybe it just doesn't work out that way. But the fact is that it does start that conversation and the dissenting view, your own in this case from what you're saying, is as important as the guarantee. It's a dialectic that has to be brought out, and if that isn't at least happening, then for sure nothing is happening there. But I think with my recent sculpture in Texas, people were thinking that it was purely advertising and not art, for me it was clearly art and there was a discussion which evolved from that. I think that that is the nature of the language, and I think there can be a healthy amount of doubt built into it. [Playboy Marfa, 2013]