I think that if you don't like something and it's not easy, you shouldn't be doing it..

Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells anything else, it is a seductive advertisement..

Most famous artists are created by their work and the idea of them as a character, and if they're smart and ambitious, they reinforce that character ….

Choosing beauty over content (or choosing beauty as content) is always an act of sedition. If we accept the cant of official culture, we must believe….

In images,... beauty was the agency that caused visual pleasure in the beholder; and any theory of images that was not grounded in the pleasure of th….

If I go to London, everyone wants to talk about Damien Hirst. I'm just not interested in him. Never have been..

In my experience, you always think you know what you're doing; you always think you can explain, but you always discover, years later, that you didn'….

Where do you learn how to act? Not at church. America is a lot more like pagan Rome than we think. We still sacrifice to objects to gain our social g….

Beauty is and always will be blue skies and open highway..

I hate all that woozy political and psychotherapeutic crap applied to books and art..

I don't think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists..

Art and writing come from somewhere down around the lizard brain. It's a much more peculiar activity than we like to think it is. The problems arise ….

Art has political consequences, which is to say, it reorganizes society and creates constituencies of people around it..

It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn't understand, you'd have some obligation to guess. Now you don't..

Even if one succeeds in making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, there remains the problem of what to do with a one-eared sow..

When you really respect somebody who does something different from you, your respect is for the quality of the job..

...There are issues worth advancing in images worth admiring; and the truth is never "plain," nor appearances ever "sincere." To try to make them so ….

The idea of political content is irrelevant. Content is irrelevant. I always tell my students, "Never forget you're writing words! You know, word one….

Out of sheer perversity, I followed beauty where it lead, into the silence..

Martha Stewart contributes more to our civility than the Baptist Church..

I have no evangelical feelings about art at all. I despise art education. Art doesn't lend itself to education. There is no knowledge there. It's a s….