Summer is a great time to visit art museums, which offer the refreshing rinse of swimming pools - only instead of cool water, you immerse yourself in art.

Works of art often last forever, or nearly so. But exhibitions themselves, especially gallery exhibitions, are like flowers; they bloom and then they die, then exist only as memories, or pressed in magazines and books.

A lot of people still think caring about clothes is a dubious, unserious, frivolous, girlie thing.

Giorgio Morandi's paintings make me think that artists may not totally choose, or even control, their subjects or style.

Don't talk. I can't hear myself see.

Once artists are expected to shock, it's that much harder for them to do so.

To engage with art, we have to be willing to be wrong, venture outside our psychic comfort zones, suspend disbelief, and remember that art explores and alters consciousness simultaneously.