All artists and creative people are basically unhappy people. If you were happy, that would mean you were content with the world as it was and why wo….

It's possible I am the only art critic that a lot of people read. And maybe Robert Hughes, if he's still writing..

Art is always subject to change in a moment by somebody who's strong enough to shed new light on it..

Everybody's got plants, but most are just growing weeds. The cultivated have greater gardens, finer and gaudier gardens..

For Rembrandt, reality is role-playing.... Everyone is portrayed in relation to a social hierarchy..

I think being interested is really what being civilized is about. I mean, you have to be conscious of everything..

The experience of beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. The artist's relation to the object of beauty, how the art makes that happen, is….

Everything that would begin to make somebody a good student would tend to make him or her a poor artist, and vice versa..

The dominant problem of pictorial art since the nineteen-fifties is photography, and, by extension, film and video. The basilisk eye of the camera ha….

Artists are sometimes in a position to tell the truth, but they're positioned as a Cassandra. They're gifted with impeccable prophecy and the assuran….

I find that the mask of the critic is to have distance..

Love and fear, the two strongest emotions we have. It all starts with emotion..

There is an ineffable but fatal difference in attitude between people behaving naturally and people behaving naturally for a camera..

Smithson was someone of tremendous significance whose work was not beautiful at all. I think he was an iconoclast..

Rembrandt was way ahead of his time. It's as if he was painting an amateur theatrical, or a professional theatrical, in his studio. It's a kind of pe….

Comic books, graphic novels, involve constant toggling and it's hard work. You get tired reading comic books, but you never get tired looking at pict….

With art criticism it's difficult to discuss beauty, to assess it, because there's always the possibility that we're insane..

There's art that I would readily buy if I could afford it, and enjoy, but would never write about because it doesn't seem significant..

The aesthetic experience has to be given. And beauty is a regular experience of every person - every person who is not clinically depressed!.

Everything I've learned about art was (a) because I was actually interested, or (b) I was actually interested in covering my ass because of what I wa….

You don't need everybody to agree with you, but you do need a few people. And by this point I have a fairly high degree of confidence in my judgment,….