I don’t feel any negativity from Europe. Anyway, the artworld is a small world. I mean, between New York City and Los Angeles there are probably five houses with any art of any significance in them, and I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. There are probably one hundred good artists and fifty good collectors in any given week. That’s one hundred and fifty people worldwide. It’s not like my mother knows who you are. It’s not like you’re being downloaded by my teenage son. You’re an artist. You’re obscure. Get used to it.

I know there’s all this talk about globalization and China and all, but what’s coming from China? Nothing. Whoever is collecting that stuff from the mainland is seriously misinformed. Maybe they think they’re in a Paul Bowles novel.

I heard that at the Guggenheim you’re going to be showing some of these “de Kooning” paintings you’ve been making.

That’s the plan. It depends how they look on the wall.

What are they exactly? Why did you start making them?

They started out as collages using a book of de Kooning drawings of women [Willem de Kooning: Tracing the Figure (2002)]. About two years ago I was between studios and sat with the book in my lap, drawing in it. I’ve always loved de Kooning’s women paintings. When he collaged the Camel cigarette “T-zone” smile onto the heads of his women, it was the beginning of Pop art. That’s like 1953–54? That’s just my opinion.

Anyway, what happened with the book was that all of a sudden I started to draw and collage men alongside his women. After this “continuation,” I sent out the collages to get ink-jetted and blown up on canvas, and when they came back I painted and painted and painted and became Edward G. Robinson in the movie Scarlet Street. . . . Well, not really, but it makes a nice story.

IMDb tells me that Scarlet Street is a 1945 noir about a double con: a middle-aged Sunday painter tries to convince a young woman that he’s a rich artist, while she and her crook boyfriend try to dupe him out of his “fortune.” The protagonists are named, respectively, Chris Cross, Kitty March, and Johnny Prince.

One of the things that I’ve always felt about your work, but have never been able to articulate until this discussion with you, is that it’s quietly uncanny. It’s something about your deadpan; everything you look at seems to become your doppelgänger.

The question for me has always been, “Who do you think you are?” Game shows like Who Do You Trust?, To Tell the Truth, Truth or Consequences, I’ve Got a Secret—they were all popular when I was growing up. The idea of substituting, stand-ins, exchanging places with another person is interesting to me. The desire to be someone else—there was another TV show when I was growing up called Queen for a Day—to play a part, take on a role, to be an understudy is either part of an insecurity or a huge ego.

Someone told me that in interviews people want to be asked certain questions that never actually get asked. Then someone else told me that if I thought this was a new angle, I was sadly mistaken. But I’m trying it anyway. Is there a question you’re hoping I’ll ask you?

I always go with the suicide question. Which artist do you identify with the most? Arthur Cravan, Lew Welch, Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Cobain? Artist, poet, writer, rock star . . . There was a moment when I could have died with the actress who played Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks back in 1994; her real name was Sheryl Lee, and we were dating, and if it had happened we could have been big in Japan forever. I’m thinking treatment . . . and pitch . . . and talking to someone like Mike Ovitz and getting turned down.

Do you consider the way you present yourself to be a kind of performance?

Not really. “Really” being the operative word.

Richard Prince’s retrospective “Richard Prince: Spiritual America” will be on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, from September 28 to January 9, 2008. His project at the Frieze Art Fair, London, will be on view from October 11 to 14. "Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere" comes to ARTINFO from the September 2007 issue of Modern Painters.