Auction houses run a rigged game. They know exactly how many people will be bidding on a work and exactly who they are. In a gallery, works of art need only one person who wants to pay for them.

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.

Speaking as a Christian, I find the Apostle Paul appealing and the apostle Peale appalling.

Today is a beautiful day. Thank you!

being honest to the people around you is the best thing you ever do to them, but expecting the same from them is the worst thing you ever do to yourself

...I'd come home but nearly everybody does. It's the ones that don't go home that I feel sorry for, they're not happy.

I'm not going to put out a Christmas CD until it's coming out of me naturally.

We don't want to go back to the same policies and practicies that drove our economy into a ditch, that punished the middle class, and that led to this catastrophe. We keep moving forward.

I'm big on my kids being conventionally polite, and it works really well for them.

I can say with pride verging on smugness that I've got two very successful shows that assume their audience is very smart.

You can't just stick with what you know, you have to evolve.

I never really spent time being jealous. Maybe I should have.