JOHNS: I was doing […] sculptures of small objects—flashlights and light bulbs. Then I heard a story about Willem de Kooning. He was annoyed with my dealer, Leo Castelli, for some reason, and said something like, “That son-of-a-bitch; you could give him two beer cans and he could sell them.” I heard this and thought, “What a sculpture—two beer cans.” It seemed to me to fit in perfectly with what I was doing, so I did them—and Leo sold them.
INTERVIEWER: Should an artist accept suggestions—or his environment—so easily?
JOHNS: I think basically that’s a false way of thinking. Accept or reject, where’s the ease or the difficulty? I don’t put any value on a kind of thinking that puts limits on things. I prefer that the artist does what he does than that, after he’s done it, someone says he shouldn’t have done it. I would encourage everybody to do more rather than less.
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