Robert Rauschenberg was not a giant of American art; he was the giant. No American created so many aesthetic openings for so many artists.

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 never set out to be weird. It was always other people who called me weird.

It is possible to refine awareness itself so much that the emptiness of things, and the role mental construction plays, becomes a directly apprehended reality.

One of the biggest mistakes that you could make while pursuing your dream, is to not study the footsteps of those who are already successful in your field.

I'm better with my hands, and I always loved the slightly romantic idea of starting with bits of wood and being able to create something to sit on, to eat from, to store your clothes in.

I just hope to work with great people, and do things that are challenging for me and that I can be proud of and not have to hide my face about. Those are my guidelines.

It's not about where you come from, it's about heart.

If the inspiration is genuine and it's coming from the right place, that's what I like and want to be a part of.

I try to live in the moment and let that moment carry me to the next great place.

Do what you love and try not to look at what other people occupy themselves with.

Civil government being the sole object of forming societies, its administration must be conducted by common consent.