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

At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act-rather than as a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze or express an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event.

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.

The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life.

America is the civilization of people engaged in transforming themselves. In the past, the stars of the performance were the pioneer and the immigrant. Today, it is youth and the Black.

An artist is a person who has invented an artist.

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.