I try to figure out - intellectually, philosophically, psychologically - what the experience of beauty is.

It's a grave mistake in publishing, whether you're talking about Internet or print publication, to try to play to a limited repertoire of established reader interests.

Dumbing down takes many forms: art that is good for you, museums that flatter you, universities that increase your self-esteem. Culture, after all, is really about you.

Salvador Dali has been called kitsch, but, although some of this work may be grotesque, its brazenly self-conscious bad taste saves it from being true kitsch, which always strives to please.

I try to figure out - intellectually, philosophically, psychologically - what the experience of beauty is.

[Art] would have helped us survive in the Pleistocene - in the period, say, 1.6 million years ago until fairly recently. The kind of imaginative abilities that artists have and that we all have in the appreciation of art - to appreciate Jane Austen, the late quartets of Beethoven.

I think the idea of the social construction of beauty - this idea that beauty is simply whatever culture or society says it is - is on the run. Of course, beauty does arise in a cultural context. No one ever denies that. But there's also a natural response people have to it.