The problem of making artists talk about their work is that when they're making their work the left-brain is shut off. So if you talk to an artist about it, you're talking to someone who wasn't there. It's hopeless.

It's possible I am the only art critic that a lot of people read. And maybe Robert Hughes, if he's still writing.

Smithson was someone of tremendous significance whose work was not beautiful at all. I think he was an iconoclast.

A word is a thought, of course. But any image, including a photograph, may become an instrument of sufficiently lucid cogitation.

I think being interested is really what being civilized is about. I mean, you have to be conscious of everything.

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

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.