The last time money left the art world, intrepid types maxed out their credit cards and opened galleries, and a few of them have become the best in the world.

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.

Put your sword back in its place, " Jesus said to him, "for all who draw the sword will die by the sword.

Art sometimes imitates life. When it does, science fiction presages what form that life may take.

Our age has need of violence, " he writes. And he is violence.

The call of death is a call of love. Death can be sweet if we answer it in the affirmative, if we accept it as one of the great eternal forms of life and transformation.

I became disconnected from the childlike play that art could be. I spent so much time fearing I wasn't good enough that I lost the sense that my artistic expression was worthy.

In my judgment, a great mistake has been made by well meaning and zealous men, through treating error and infidelity with altogether too much respect.

Part of spiritual and emotional maturity is recognizing that it's not like you're going to try to fix yourself and become a different person. You remain the same person, but you become awakened.

You might be a redneck if in an effort to watch your cholesterol, you eat Spam Lite.

Grief reconfigures time, its length, its texture, its function: one day means no more than the next, so why have they been picked out and given separate names?

What matters is the face you show the world, not the quaking mess behind it.