The New York art world readily proves people wrong. Just when folks say that things stink and flibbertigibbet critics wish the worst on us all because we're not pure enough, good omens appear.

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.

Every tiny molecule of Ash is in motion with my heat I am such a Lunatic that I am free even in Jail.

No matter how powerful, countries cannot rule the whole world. The world is ruled by brains, by justice, by morals and by fairness.

It takes persistent practice to be skilful in the act.

Running my fastest not from my past. Running from those who have hurt me in it. And, they can't catch me anymore. I escaped from the land of make believe.

It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.

No individual is isolated. He who is sad, saddens others.

He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.

Not worth is an example that does not solve the problem.

Apology is both transactional, in that it restores what has been broken to what it was before, and transformational, in that it creates opportunities that didn't exist before.

My lips got lost on the way to the kiss - that's how drunk I was.