The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is, can do, or is worth on an existential, alchemical level.

I'm not for or against video - or any medium or style, for that matter.

Where Cezanne captured and intensified shards of the eternal (every pear far more sharply defined than it could be in life), Monet portrayed the changeability and flux of every moment. 'The Water Lilies' give you a jittery, amorphous sense of a world seen at the speed of light.

Batty as it sounds, subject and style may choose artists, through some unfathomable cosmic means. How else to explain that even artists who enjoy what they do can be perplexed or even horrified that they're doing it?

Art is good, bad, boring, ugly, useful to us or not.

Calling a young artist 'great' these days can give one the heebie-jeebies: The word has been denatured in the past decade.

Chris Ofili's suave, stippled, visually tricked-out paintings of the nineties, with their allover fields of shimmering dots and clumps of dung, are like cave paintings of modern life. They crackle with optical cockiness, love, and massive amounts of painterly mojo.