All art comes from other art, and all immigrants come from other places.

Being critical of art is a way of showing art respect. No sports writer would say, "Well the Yankees had a great season this year." No food critic would get a bad meal and say, "Oh, it was so lovely." It always strikes me as odd when people say, "Why do you write negatively about any art?" I think that everybody has mixed feelings about everything - even Goya. I mean, I look at Rembrandt sometimes and I hear a voice in my head go, "It's pretty brown."

In the late nineties, Katy Grannan began making haunting photographs of people who had extraordinary inner yens to be seen by strangers.

The reason I love blogs so much right now is that I am seeing more critical voices appear, and that's kind of thrilling. I think a lot of critics in their forties or even their thirties have had their voice scared or trained out of them by the academy. I have nothing against the academy. I think it's brilliant and fantastic, but I also think that it's become almost monolithic. The same way a lot of art looks the same, a lot of writing can sound the same and quotes the same theorists.

I rage against Vincent van Gogh for needing to die at 37, after painting for only ten years.

Abstraction is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world.

Many things happened in the sixties, but the period is no more significant, better, or more 'political' than today. It's time to turn the page.