When people in stadiums do the Wave, it's the group-mind collective organism spontaneously organizing itself to express an emotion, pass time, and reflect the joy of seeing the rhythms of many as one, a visual rhyming or music in which everyone senses where the motion is going.

The art world is molting - some would say melting. Galleries are closing; museums are scaling back.

I often find myself privately stewing about much British art, thinking that except for their tremendous gardens, that the English are not primarily visual artists, and are, in nearly unsurpassable ways, literary.

Ofili is still a champion. It would be a huge mistake to think otherwise.

There's one Baldessari work I genuinely love and would like to own, maybe because of my Midwestern roots and love of driving alone. 'The backs of all the trucks passed while driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, California, Sunday, 20 January 1963' consists of a grid of 32 small color photographs depicting just what the title says.

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."

Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall.