Could a mad fantasy lastly be fulfilled? When the artist Anselm Kiefer was a toddler, he tells me, his best ambition was to turn out to be the pope. “I wished to have at all times perfection,” he says. He had been introduced up as a Catholic. He had served as an altar boy. He knew the mass in Latin. “And the pope appeared to me the very highest factor you may be.”
Later, satisfied by his dad and mom that this explicit dream was unattainable — “a German had by no means been pope, they instructed me” — he modified his goal. He swapped pontiff for painter. But it surely was solely the main target of his ambitions that had shifted, not their scale. “I’m the best painter, and there’s little question,” his youthful
