It used to be that if you stood in front of a painting you didn't understand, you'd have some obligation to guess. Now you don't.

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

The idea of political content is irrelevant. Content is irrelevant. I always tell my students, "Never forget you're writing words! You know, word one, word two, word three, word four. The words have to be organized. Nothing else does."

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

I think that if you don't like something and it's not easy, you shouldn't be doing it.

Martha Stewart contributes more to our civility than the Baptist Church.

Jazz presumes that it would be nice if the four of us-simpatico dudes that we are-while playing this complicated song together, might somehow be free and autonomous as well. Tragically, this never quite works out. At best, we can only be free one or two at a time-while the other dudes hold onto the wire. Which is not to say that no one has tried to dispense with wires. Many have, and sometimes it works-but it doesn't feel like jazz when it does. The music simply drifts away into the stratosphere of formal dialectic, beyond our social concerns.