Summer is a great time to visit art museums, which offer the refreshing rinse of swimming pools - only instead of cool water, you immerse yourself in art.

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.

Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.

Humans get used to even if they are in the hell.

I'm never happier than when I'm part of an ensemble. The rhythm of working in a group and the dynamic of each individual relationship within that group coming together is such a special thing.

Jail threats did not dissuade Martin Luther King - and intergenerational justice is a moral issue of comparable magnitude to civil rights.

Dublin was turning into Disneyland with super-pubs, a Purgatory open till five in the morning.

There is no question that the older you get, the fewer good roles there are.

Start using your wings; they need some exercise.

Love's in need of love today...don't delay...send yours in right away

Sometimes the ensemble 'Eighth Blackbird' will have performances and invite me to be a featured soloist. I think that is what they call it in that world-"featured soloist."

It sounds kind of stupid, but I've never not wanted to be a musician. It's been inside me since I was little so I don't know what else I would do.