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Pop Culture
Sep 17, 2016, 07:00AM

Nobody Would Buy Those Interiors

A 2015 The Verge interview with rapper Heems vs. a 1984 Archives of American Art interview with the late conceptual artist Tom Wesselmann.

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Tom Wesselmann: Are you going to organize this material?

Heems: Yeah. I'm writing about Queens; it's hard to explain.

Wesselmann: I tend to do that a lot, too, not quite as obviously or sometimes maybe more obviously, depending on how you look at it. 

Heems: [looks at his phone, laughs] It's nice to get away from where you are. 

Wesselmann: Yes, whatever. We should at least use up the tape.

***

Heems: But at the same time, it's a working-class art form, and that's why it speaks to the types of things I want to talk about.

Wesselmann: It was always just socializing, never talking about art. 

Heems: I mean, no. Not a real thing.

Wesselmann: Nobody would buy those interiors.

Heems: [Whispers] A crowd is a crowd.

***

Wesselmann: Anything I do is going to engage me and be terribly interesting ultimately.

Heems: Salman Rushdie has been really helpful to me and encouraging me, I shoot him my ideas. 

Wesselmann: Those are all so abstract now that I can't remember what in the world I was talking about, except the idea of God was important.

Heems: Right, well, basically it is this other idea of what do you want white people to know? 

Wesselmann: Nothing, that's all. And once I got turned on to that, nothing could stop me.

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