The Met is not only the finest encyclopedic museum of art in the United States; it is arguably the finest anywhere.

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.

Learning the way of grace is about truth. It’s reconciling the truth, of both our own infinite value and of others’ infinite value—despite our depths ofbrokenness.

I am what I am, and I don't apologize for being honest.

On a surface level, regionalism is gone, if we define regionalism as human culture. But, what if we define regionalism as something older than human culture?

Through training there is knowledge. You can produce compassion, love, forgiveness. you can change yourself.

A grand old odalisque should never deign to turn housewife.

The world is a library of strange and wonderful books, and sometimes we just need to go prowling through the stacks.

I think you have everyone kind of pulling on the same end of the rope. It's not like you're Robin Williams and everyone else is a deaf mute. It's like - there's plenty of help.

If our mushrooms make you hallucinate, please inform us immediately so we can overcharge you.

Sometimes I have a feeling, when I look back on my life, that all I've been through has prepared me perfectly for just what I'm doing now.

They were willing to do anything to stop me.