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

What better way to prove that you understand a subject than to make money out of it?

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.

American time has stretched around the world. It has become the dominant tempo of modern history, especially of the history of Europe.

Politics in the United States consists of the struggle between those whose change has been arrested by success or failure, on one side, and those who are still engaged in changing themselves, on the other. Agitators of arrested metamorphosis versus agitators of continued metamorphosis. The former have the advantage of numbers (since most people accept themselves as successes or failures quite early), the latter of vitality and visibility (since self-transformation, though it begins from within, with ideology, religion, drugs, tends to express itself publicly through costume and jargon).

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 values to which the conservative appeals are inevitably caricatured by the individuals designated to put them into practice.