The reason I love blogs so much right now is that I am seeing more critical voices appear, and that's kind of thrilling. I think a lot of critics in their forties or even their thirties have had their voice scared or trained out of them by the academy. I have nothing against the academy. I think it's brilliant and fantastic, but I also think that it's become almost monolithic. The same way a lot of art looks the same, a lot of writing can sound the same and quotes the same theorists.

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

Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you'll find it. It's there in paintings of photographs, photographs of advertising, sculpture with ready-made objects, videos using already-existing film.

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.'

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946, when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met, principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.

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

A saboteur in the house of art and a comedienne in the house of art theory, Lawler has spent three decades documenting the secret life of art. Functioning as a kind of one-woman CSI unit, she has photographed pictures and objects in collectors' homes, in galleries, on the walls of auction houses, and off the walls, in museum storage.