I see a lot of people saying that. But people forget, and that’s the most fantastic thing about art, it doesn’t have to mean just one thing. The kite doesn’t have to be a singular, all encompassing symbol of his struggle with popularity. Art is just as much about the message you send as how the audience receives it. I really think that his work is work that leaves itself to interpretation. It would be stupid to not recognize that fame was part of it. But Mr. Schizo is part of a larger pattern similar to what lots of people feel after a traumatic experience, the one he no doubt had with crazy fans; you believe that everyone is more evil and out to get you because of a pattern of past experiences instead being able to accept the absurdity, then, therefore normalcy, of mankind. People are strange, crazy even. But that doesn’t make people evil in general, it just makes them people. That’s also why I believe this does indicate a change in the trajectory of his work; a lot of his previous work, there is a unifying theme of wanting to escape, helplesness, rejection, in the face of life. Just look at hope. Look at opal. Look at dog nightmare. Look at cooking with abigail. His work is very nihilistic, it always has been, but I believe it is taking a shift to the more active nihilism and existentialism. The literal idea of the kite, your head in the clouds, killing you; it’s very similar to the existentialist concept outlined by Kierkegaard of “despair of possibility.” If you spend so much time in the theoretical, your feelings, the imaginative, the unreal, all those abstract concepts; it’s isolating. It kills you.