Julian Opie on cancel culture: 'It's tedious if everything gets read through the filter of the day' - The Telegraph

14 June 2021

Julian Opie thinks we’ve got it all wrong about artists – and Vincent van Gogh is to blame. The image of the tormented Dutchman “not selling anything and struggling with painting after painting”, he says, has left us believing “that’s what honourable artists should be doing, and anything less is seen as some kind of corruption”.

We’re in Shoreditch, east London, in the four-storey 19th-century warehouse that Opie, now 63, bought in his late 20s, and has transformed into the busy HQ of a highly successful 21st-century artist. On the ground floor are packing crates, sculptures, lightbox paintings and a walk-through model of a French village that he’s making for a new exhibition this month at Pitzhanger Manor in Ealing. Up a steep staircase sits one of his three studio managers. There are artworks coming in and out, processes to be outsourced – with fabricators, 3D printers and LED makers (“I can’t build LEDs. It’d slow me down”).

Read the full piece in The Telegraph.