Randy Kennedy tries to get to the bottom of Paul McCarthy’s success and appeal in a New York Times Magazine profile. What McCarthy wants is to puncture the acceptance of the entertainment-as-reality culture that dominates the US:

To anyone who thinks of contemporary art as a confrontational, profane, puerile, nihilistic, body-obsessed in-joke, McCarthy provides a near-perfect example of all that has gone wrong since the ’60s. His work can — and does — provoke physical revulsion. But it is not mere provocation; it’s intended as an all-out assault, a “program of resistance,” as he calls it. And the older he gets, the more explicit he has become that his target is the American entertainment-consumer economy. “I can see much more clearly now that we are living in the middle of this kind of insanity,” he told me, “and it runs itself. And the really scary thing is that we’re not conscious of it anymore. It’s a kind of fascism. The end goal of this kind of capitalism is to erase difference, to eradicate cultures, to turn us all into a form of cyborg, people who all want the same thing.”

McCarthy emerged from a group of California artists like Christopher Bureden who relied on performances. Yet to have an effective voice, both discovered the need to make objects:

Like Burden, who gave up pure performance and started creating sculpture and installations, McCarthy decided that to have a lasting influence in the art world, he had to begin making objects. […] His work was never meant to be easy for the commercial art world to digest, which for a long time, it didn’t. “A lot of stuff got thrown out,” he says. “There were times when we needed space, and we would just take a load out to the dump.”

That approach to art making still leaves a mark on McCarthy’s view of the market:

“I never really think about the money,” McCarthy told me over sandwiches one afternoon at the house. “I just think about the next piece and about how we’ll do it and how much it will be. And sometimes I think, Wow, that’s a lot. And sometimes we have it, and sometimes we don’t.”

The Demented Engineer (NY Times)