One of the grotesqueries of present-day American life is the amount of reasoning that goes into displaying the wisdom secreted in bad movies while proving that modern art is meaningless. They have put into practice the notion that a bad art work cleverly interpreted according to some obscure Method is more rewarding than a masterpiece wrapped in silence.

Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself.

Kitsch is the daily art of our time, as the vase or the hymn was for earlier generations. For the sensibility it has that arbitrariness and importance which works take on when they are no longer noticeable elements of the environment. In America kitsch is Nature. The Rocky Mountains have resembled fake art for a century.

Today, each artist must undertake to invent himself, a lifelong act of creation that constitutes the essential content of the artist's work.

Only conservatives believe that subversion is still being carried on in the arts and that society is being shaken by it. Advanced art today is no longer a cause -it contains no moral imperative. There is no virtue in clinging to principles and standards, no vice in selling or in selling out.

The purpose of education is to keep a culture from being drowned in senseless repetitions, each of which claims to offer a new insight.

The aim of every authentic artist is not to conform to the history of art, but to release himself from it in order to replace it with his own history.