Bad taste is real taste, of course, and good taste is the residue of someone else's privilege.

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

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 the beholder begged the question of their efficacy and doomed itself to inconsequence.

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

With the artists, I don't teach, I coach. I can't tell them how to make art. I tell them to make more art. I tell them to get up early and stay up late. I tell them not to quit. I tell them if somebody else is already making their work. My job is to be current with the discourse and not be an asshole. That's all I wanted in a professor.

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

Art editors and critics - people like me - have become a courtier class.