It's time for a recovery and reassessment of North American thinkers. Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler and Norman O. Brown are the linked triad I would substitute for Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, whose work belongs to ravaged postwar Europe and whose ideas transfer poorly into the Anglo-American tradition.

Feminism has become a catch-all vegetable drawer where bunches of clingy sob sisters can store their moldy neuroses.

It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation.

I believe that the shocking toll of AIDS on gay men in the West was partly due to their Seventies delusions that a world without women was possible. All-male energies, unbalanced and ravenous, literally tore the body apart.

I want a revamped feminism. Putting the vamp back means the lady must be a tramp. My generation of the Sixties rebels wanted to smash the bourgeois codes that had become authoritarian totems of the Fifties. The 'nice' girl with her soft, sanitized speech and decorous manners had to go. Thirty years later, we're still stuck with her - in the official spokesmen and the anointed heiresses of the feminist establishment.

My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses.

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera, theater, music and dance are thriving all over the world, but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.