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.