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 when we try to domesticate the practice, to pretend that it's a normal human activity and that "everybody's creative." They're not.

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.

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

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

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

I don't think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists.

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 set of propositions about how things should look.