The art world is molting - some would say melting. Galleries are closing; museums are scaling back.

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 man is capable of doing good to another, but to contribute to the happiness of an entire society is to become akin to the gods

Thus every matter, if it is to be done well, calls for the attention of the whole person.

What's your name?""Emma Gould, " she said. "What's yours?""Wanted.""By all the girls or just the law?

The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort.

The impression that a praying mother leaves upon her children is life-long. Perhaps when you are dead and gone your prayer will be answered.

If you think you're a leader and you turn around and no one is following you, then you're simply out for a walk.

When educating horses there is no greater maxim than slow is fast and fast is slow.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

Consider me the entity within the industry without a history of spitting the epitome of stupidity.

The leader of the deed was a woman. -Dux femina facti