At the heart of Ferguson’s project is the notion that it is pointless to become another painter—figurative, abstract, or otherwise. From the beginning, appropriating and repainting the Taschen-published book Albert Oehlen as a series of new paintings was done so that those paintings could one day be collected in a book, a painterly gesture inextricable from the mass-produced object. Working off of a living artist in this way puts Ferguson firmly in the Sturtevant camp. Ferguson aims to create a disjuncture in the present, and a genius in idiocy with painting that attacks the conditions presented by art history now. “Don’t be a new painter,” says Ferguson. “If in art, any law that can be broken, should be broken, then be unlawful even to those who break the law.”