While the space for artists and curators has increased enormously, maybe, just maybe, that's left room for too many people calling themselves artists and curators who are simply not up to the term.

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.

View Conflict as an Adventure not a threat.

Time only goes in that one direction.

Make sure the fortune that you seek is the fortune that you need.

We evolved as creatures knitted into the fabric of nature, and without its intimate truths, we can find ourselves unraveling.

Your thinking, more than anything else, shapes the way you live. It's really true that if you change your thinking, you can change your life.

I think that it's a universal urge to have our pain not be felt alone and to have our joys not be felt alone.

Heaven will ask things of you at some point, perhaps small things at first. You must be ready.

The point we emphasize is strong confidence in our original nature.

I think this is what college is all about: self-examination and dealing with those questions of "Who am I?"

Oh! faint delicious spring-time violet, Thine odor like a key, Turns noiselessly in memory's wards to let A thought of sorrow free.