VIK MUNIZ

I knew Duchamp’s work, so it seemed to me that everything possible in art had already been done. But then I saw Jeff Koons and Richard Prince, who offered a whole new set of possibilities and made me think, “I can try that kind of art.” I worked in an ad agency at the time, researching patterns of behavior among people who look at billboards. So the whole idea of work that was derived from the media and that dealt with a sort of media feedback made sense to me. Here were artists making art about things you see on TV! Until then, I had felt there was a discrepancy between art and the way people participated in the world. After all, this is not the world of landscape painting anymore.

—As told to Tim Griffin