Calling a young artist 'great' these days can give one the heebie-jeebies: The word has been denatured in the past decade.

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.

I don't think that anyone outside Paris can understand love and murder as we do.But Emile loves Paris, and loving Paris is a murderous education. ("Anthropology: What Is Lost In Rotation")

transformation begins with the individual” Dr William Edwards DemingThe New Economics - 1993

Death is the ultimate negative.

My parents were the ones who gave me the independence, who gave me the spark to do anything that you set your mind to, as all parents should do for their kids.

Cutting benefits is not the right answer. Raising the retirement age is not the best option.

You can't make a great play until you first do it in practice.

I literally in the New York flea market - just when I was despairing of ever having a great serendipitous find - found a 1926 Chanel.

The bonds that unite another person to our self exist only in our mind.

I think any young person who is going into the same field as their parent whose parent has been very successful, it's complicated.And it was complicated for me.

Clint Eastwood is aging beautifully. But someone like Burt Reynolds and others are practically destroying their faces in the amount of work they have.