I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Richard Prince’s work. I love his sense of humor, but so many of the pieces strike me as 2 parts Ed Ruscha plus 3 parts pretention.

Regardless, I love some of the things he says in the December Vanity Fair. After encountering so many stacks upon stacks of awful artist’s statements, this is a wonderful thing to see:

“My studio is the only place I feel good in,” he says. “There I’m fearless; outside I’m a mess. The editorial world, the square world. The studio is a hipper world where I can operate according to my own artificial reality.

That reality is primarily based on pleasure—as is most of Prince’s work. Although he’s been hailed for his “sophisticated critiques... of American consumer culture,“ Prince insists that his motivation is far more basic in nature. “Art has always made me feel good,” he says. “Anything I do, I hope it would make you feel good. It’s as simple as that. There’s no real mystery.”