NEW YORK— One of the brightest, most entertaining, and most voraciously inquisitive artists on the contemporary scene is American Tom Sachs. Ever since he made his infamous Chanel- and Nike-clad Hello Kitty Nativity for the windows of Barney’s New York in 1994, Sachs has been best known for his fascination with the brands of contemporary commerce [his current show at Sperone Westwater includes an homage to his favorite craft knife — Quality (2008)]. He is also recognized for sculptures that are enormously ambitious in their range and scale — he reenacted a lunar landing at Gagosian Los Angeles last fall — but which make all too obvious how they were created. Everything in Sachs’s art is do-it-yourself, or, to borrow the title of the show he curated in 2000, “American Bricolage.” The glue-gun drip is probably as close as he comes to having to a signature brushstroke.

Sachs’s imagery and references seem almost boundless — in talking about his work he’ll refer as casually to Manet as to the Dead Kennedys, and within the space of a few words — and as a consequence, his content is often taken to be simply iconoclastic. But his comments make obvious that while virtually anything can find its way into his art, Sachs is pursuing meanings that are more permanent than those offered up by contemporary culture.

We’ll be seeing plenty of Sachs in New York City this summer. His splendid show “Animals” is at Sperone Westwater until June 21, and his “Bronze Collection,” which features sculptures of Hello Kitty, skateboard ramps, and towers of car batteries, will be at Lever House through September 6.

Sachs spoke to ARTINFO while putting the finishing touches on his show at Sperone Westwater, where he has converted their huge main gallery into a network of small interconnecting rooms.

Tom, why did you build these small rooms for your sculptures?

Well, I liked the small spaces here, and I hated the big space with the columns, because as a sculptor, how can you compete with a column that’s holding up the building? You can’t. Your art’s not as important as that. So the four extra rooms in the middle gallery were to annihilate those columns. And I think we did it really well, because they’re nice small galleries.

I’m intrigued, though, because your reputation is for leaving the evidence of your working process, but these walls look “real,” as if they’ve always been here.

Right. Our original idea was to make the walls out of foam core, so that you would see the process more, but we just didn’t have time. We only had a week for the installation after the last exhibition, and to do it the conventional way was stronger and quicker and cheaper.

But in the time that the walls were being built, I began to see that this is a bump up in quality from any previous show I’ve done. I’ve brought a whole new level of seriousness to the production end. I could never have afforded to do this kind of work 10 years ago; I started as a contractor. But as the economics of my art have shifted, I’ve tried to put some of that back into the work. Now I can spend months on a piece, and the economics support it. Of course I also used to make everything myself, and now I can’t do that. But I’ve been working with some of these people for 10 years, so it’s interchangeable who does what.

Tell me about these foam core pictures, the ones with the classical titles like Achilles (2007) and Sisyphus (2007).

What happened here was that the bronzes [at Lever House] are bronze casts of foam core sculptures of Hello Kitty. We made a couple of models that didn’t work out, and we smashed the molds before we cast them. This resulted in a huge [financial] loss, so, “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade” (that’s Dale Carnegie). These are all reconstituted panels of a smashed-out, flattened Hello Kitty. In Achilles, you can see her tail and her back skin filleted à la Silence of the Lambs, and in Sisyphus, you can see her face and her bow.

Why make sculptures of Hello Kitty in the first place?

Well years ago, it was just this thing that my sister collected as a child. Then it stuck around with me because of its high quality of production, and also because it seems almost like a pure merchandising icon. It’s almost Buddhist — Buddhism for the consumer world. Some people might call it insipid or meaningless or banal, but I think it’s just peaceful. It has a serenity in what it is. It’s really the most direct thing that I’ve ever come across.

Let me ask you about what is probably the most striking piece here — Baleanoptera Musculus (2006). Why did you decide to put the blue whale on top of the piano?

For me, the whale is something that is, conceptually, pure good. There’s no consumerism to it, there’s nothing. It’s just simply the largest animal there’s ever been on the planet, and if I was an alien visiting the planet, that’s the animal that I’d want to talk with. There are all these great things about whales: they’re mammals; they have “hands” — each one of those flippers has five fingers inside it; they nurse their young; they work together to hunt; they communicate over thousands of miles using sound; and they travel the whole world. So they’re these animals that are probably a lot like us. For me, although so many of the things that I’ve worked with throughout the rest of the show deal with the nefarious aspects of our culture and the social problems we have, this whale is something that I aspire to, conceptually. I aspire to this level of greatness and purity.

On the other hand, it just looks fucking great: You can see the whole whale reflected in the surface of the piano. It’s really important to me how things look. Something that no one ever talks about in my work is the richness of detail and color and depth. Years and years ago, my mom said to me, “If you don’t make your things look really good, when you die, people are just going to throw them out.” She was referring to some sculpture that was stored in her garage, and she wanted it the hell out of there.

I think a lot of the artists of my generation and the generation after ours have an “anti-aesthetic,” where badness is cool, and it’s groovy to make things look bad on purpose — à la Manet, I think he started it all — but I don’t buy that. I grew up listening to punk rock and hard core, and the best bands — like the Dead Kennedys or Black Flag or Minor Threat — had beautiful musicianship and wrote gorgeous, melodic songs. In any genre, even within punk and hardcore, you have things of beauty, and it’s really important to me to maintain that in this whole show.

I’ve always sensed that that’s why you leave the traces of your work — because you see a beauty in that as well, as though it’s a mark of respect for craftsmanship.

Yes, thank you for acknowledging that. That’s hugely important to me. You can see exactly how we made the whale, and you see it on top of the Bösendorfer, which is at the other end of craftsmanship. We’ve spent 500 years getting to that kind of craftsmanship. Here is a $300,000 piano, and all of the craft that’s gone into it has been about erasing itself. The guys who made it worked so hard to get this incredible lacquer finish, so there’s no evidence of the work at all. This is my response to all of that: We work our asses off to show all the work.

Tom, it sometimes seems to me that your art is one big enjoyable game. Do you believe that artists who enjoy what they do make better art?

Oh, of course. And artists don’t have the corner on creativity; I think it’s true of everyone. If you don’t enjoy what you’re doing, you’re not going to get anything out of it. There are no exceptions to that.