Abstraction brings the world into more complex, variable relations; it can extract beauty, alternative topographies, ugliness, and intense actualities from seeming nothingness.

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.

You're off to Great Places!Today is your day!Your mountain is waiting, So... get on your way!

Professional accountability is a good thing. Without it, excellence is merely a pipe dream and even average performance isn’t a realistic expectation.

Be bold and never feel shy to consult people. You may appear like a stupid person for few minutes if you ask questions

Anthropology found its Galileo in Rivers, its Newton in Mauss.

We cannot improve the making of our eyes, but we can endlessly perfect the camera.

My only regret is that we didn't have more kids. I came from a family of four kids, but my wife and I just started too late.

Nature is only another chimera.

whatever devotion to something else there was in him had been made impure by church taken as a weekly, dutiful thing.

I got my very last tattoo after my father died. I'm not getting anymore; otherwise I'll end up like Mike Tyson with a tattoo on my face.

Why don't those damn oil companies fly their own flags on their personal property-maybe a flag with a gas pump on it.