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.

[On U.S. universities:] The bland leading the bland.

Straight men who visit prostitutes are valiantly striving to keep sex free from emotion, duty, family--in other words, from society, religion, and procreative Mother Nature.

Science cannot avert a single thunderbolt.

[On Hollywood:] America's greatest achievement.

Children are monsters of unbridled egotism and will, for they spring directly from nature, hostile intimations of immorality.

Nothing is more hackneyed than the liberal dogma that shock value confers automatic importance on an artwork.