A great artist has a unique vision...obsession. They are someone willing to fail flamboyantly.

John Baldessari, the 79-year-old conceptualist, has spent more than four decades making laconic, ironic conceptual art-about-art, both good and bad.

To engage with art, we have to be willing to be wrong, venture outside our psychic comfort zones, suspend disbelief, and remember that art explores and alters consciousness simultaneously.

Art is a way of showing the outside world what your inside world is like.

All great contemporary artists, schooled or not, are essentially self-taught and are de-skilling like crazy.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is unsurpassed at presenting more than 50 centuries of work. I go there constantly, seeing things over and over, better than I've ever seen them before.

A lot of people still think caring about clothes is a dubious, unserious, frivolous, girlie thing.

The greatest work of art about New York? The question seems nebulous. The city's magic and majesty are distilled in the photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand.

The secret of food lies in memory - of thinking and then knowing what the taste of cinnamon or steak is.

Outside museums, in noisy public squares, people look at people. Inside museums, we leave that realm and enter what might be called the group-mind, getting quiet to look at art.

In art, scandal is a false narrative, a smoke screen that camouflages rather than reveals. When we don't know what we're seeing, we overreact.

Sometimes you make the right decision, sometimes you make the decision right.

He sat on the grass, rested the carcass on his lap and bit into its soft underbelly, spilling its rank contents onto his freshly pressed shirt and slacks.

I suppose we all tend to want the impossible. And sometimes in attempting it we achieve something near enough to the impossible to elicit satisfaction.

The right way usually lies between two extremes: it is the narrow channel between the rock and the whirlpool.

When you fall in love, the natural thing to do is give yourself to it.

For whatever reason, people know that car crashes can happen but they don't live with that fear every day when they're driving, or they're able to overcome it.

A stunning first impression was not the same thing as love at first sight. But surely it was an invitation to consider the matter.

Music helps set a romantic mood. Imagine her surprise when you say, "We don't need a stereo - I have an accordion."

Being from a classical environment, I've always been provoked by classical musicians thinking that classical music is so much greater art than pop. I've always been annoyed by that.

You own a Tic Tac. Gum is just borrowed. - Esther