Occupation: Art Critic Birth: December 5, 1940
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 ….
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….
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….
Beautiful art sells. If it sells itself, it is an idolatrous commodity; if it sells anything else, it is a seductive advertisement..
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….
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'….
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..
Out of sheer perversity, I followed beauty where it lead, into the silence..
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..
Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else's privilege..
I think that if you don't like something and it's not easy, you shouldn't be doing it..
When you really respect somebody who does something different from you, your respect is for the quality of the job..
If I go to London, everyone wants to talk about Damien Hirst. I'm just not interested in him. Never have been..
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….
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 ….
...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 ….
Martha Stewart contributes more to our civility than the Baptist Church..
Jazz presumes that it would be nice if the four of us-simpatico dudes that we are-while playing this complicated song together, might somehow be free….
I don't think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists..