Granderson: Kanye West’s life and art are one. You don’t have to keep watching. It happens in the club in the corner. The world’s at your back, but nobody sees you. I wish they had. Kanye is, in a nutshell, America.
Berman: This is just the beginning of what we hope to be a series of interviews with major artists. These are all the artists we can get in to do a sit down, one on one with one of the great thinkers of our time.
Curtis: The idea that we might make some money from this, the one on one interviews in the series, is a joke. It would have been better to make 50 episodes and be like, “Here are the 40 artists we can use.” I would be like, “Here’s what we want to do, go do it.”
Berman: As you have all seen, the artists, when they are free and in their own world, they have no agenda. You have to figure out what the agenda is. And how much is it worth? I’m not going to say here what the right amount of money should be. Because there’s a problem with money today. It’s like the problem of the chicken and the egg. The chicken, whether it’s an artist or a person, has to decide where he or she is going to sell their eggs. They’re always going to be selling eggs, and nobody ever comes up with a system, a formula like, “I have this formula for you to sell your eggs.” No, they’re a market, and it’s a marketplace.
In the end, everyone is like, “What’s the point of making money? Why are you doing this?” Why are you coming up with all of this and nobody else is? Because it means you like each other. It means you have a common objective, your mission. That’s not enough.
Berman: When an artist is not focused on anything, when he’s in a creative trance, I’m like, “It’s just you and yourself.” What happens is that all of his other shit falls apart. All of his other ideas, all of his projects, and all his work, just falls apart. The problem is, because