Imagine it's 1981. You're an artist, in love with art, smitten with art history. You're also a woman, with almost no mentors to look to; art history just isn't that into you. Any woman approaching art history in the early eighties was attempting to enter an almost foreign country, a restricted and exclusionary domain that spoke a private language.

The art gods cooked up something special for James Ensor.

I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, 'the ability to conceive failure as progress.'

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

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

I have never really cooked, don't know how to use my dishwasher, and subsist mainly on prepared deli takeout. I don't even eat in restaurants much.

I like something about George W. Bush. A lot. After spending more than a decade having almost physiological-chemical reactions anytime I saw him, getting the heebie-jeebies whenever he spoke - after being sure from the start that he was a Gremlin on the wing of America - I really like the paintings of George W. Bush.