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

The place has had a super-conflicted relationship to its mission. In 1956, it opened as the Museum of Contemporary Crafts. Then in 1986 it had a midlife crisis and changed its name to the American Craft Museum. Then in 2002 the name changed again, this time to the Museum of Arts and Design. Maybe in 2025 the place will be called the Designatorium. The big problem with a museum of craft and design is that all art has craft and design.

The art world is an all-volunteer force. No one has to be here if he or she doesn't want to be, and we should be associating with anyone we want to.

Just as Pollock used the drip to meld process and product, Richter 'found' and used the smudge and the blur to ravish the eye, creating works of psychic and physical power.

Photography is the easiest thing to make, and one of the hardest things to make well.

Anybody who writes knows the horrible, wonderful, beautiful foulness that comes every week. A lot of moaning, screaming agony - "Oh my god, the deadline's coming."

Decades ago, Gerhard Richter found a painterly philosopher's stone. Like Jackson Pollock before him, he discovered something that had been in painting all along, always overlooked or discounted.