Joel-Peter Witkin

Seamus Heaney, who just won the Nobel Prize for Literature, said that "The end of art is peace." It's a wonderful statement. The reason we go to museums and the reason we look at beautiful things is that there's not much out there that's beautiful any more. I think of museums as new kinds of religious centers, as spiritual centers of the secular life.

There's this great story I know about a wanderer somewhere in a desert. He's walking along, and he hears the smashing of steel and rocks in the distance. He goes out there to where the sound is, and two men are crushing stones in the heat. He approaches one, who seems very, very angry, and he's cursing. The wanderer goes up to him and says, "What are you doing?" The man says, "I'm breaking the stones." The wanderer approaches the other man. This one is also smashing rocks, but he's not angry. The wanderer says, "What are you doing?" The man responds, "I'm building a cathedral."