A great artist has a unique vision...obsession. They are someone willing to fail flamboyantly.

Art is a self-replicating force.

There are many, many art worlds. Art contains multitudes.

I also take pleasure in the so-called negative power in Grotjahn's work. That is, I love his paintings for what they are not. Unlike much art of the past decade, Grotjahn isn't simply working from a prescribed checklist of academically acceptable, curator-approved 'isms' and twists.

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.

The Met is not only the finest encyclopedic museum of art in the United States; it is arguably the finest anywhere.

Art is a way of showing the outside world what your inside world is like.