“something that i look for in an associate is a certain amount of misunderstanding of what i’m trying to do. not a fundamental misunderstanding; just minor misunderstandings here and there. when someone doesn’t quite completely understand what you want from them, or when they didn’t quite hear what you told them to do, or when the tape is bad, or when their own fantasies start coming through, i often wind up liking what comes out of it all better than i liked my original idea. then if you take what the first person who misunderstood you did, and you give that to someone else and tell them to make it more like how they know you would want it, that’s good, too. if people never misunderstand you, and if they do everything exactly the way you tell them to, they’re just transmitters of your ideas, and you get bored with that. but when you work with people who misunderstand you, instead of getting transmissions you get transmutations, and that’s much more interesting in the long run.”

— andy warhol, the philosophy of andy warhol