The dominant problem of pictorial art since the nineteen-fifties is photography, and, by extension, film and video. The basilisk eye of the camera has withered the pride of handworked mediums. Painting survives on a case-by-case basis, its successes amounting to special exemptions from a verdict of history.

With art criticism it's difficult to discuss beauty, to assess it, because there's always the possibility that we're insane.

Beauty makes us more like ourselves and more like each other.

The experience of beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as they say. The artist's relation to the object of beauty, how the art makes that happen, is a whole other subject. Beauty is an event. Beauty is something that happens. There is no such thing as a beautiful object or a beautiful woman.

Minimalism itself had a very strong iconoclast impulse. You think of the sixties as loose and liberated, but in art it was actually quite the contrary.

There is an ineffable but fatal difference in attitude between people behaving naturally and people behaving naturally for a camera.

The artist is a strange being. I think it's safe to say that a real artist is conscious of having a personal singularity that is partly a blessing and partly a curse. An artist enjoys and suffers from isolation. As solitude, isolation can nurture. It can also destroy.