It is the nature of carnivores to get power and then, having disposed of their enemies, to deploy the emollient powers of Great Art to make themselves look like herbivores.

An ideal museum show would be a mating of Brideshead Revisited with House & Garden, provoking intense and pleasurable nostalgia for a past that none of its audience has had.

The hallmark of the minor artist is to be obsessed with style as an end in itself.

Indeed, the idea that doubt can be heroic, if it is locked into a structure as grand as that of the paintings of Cezanne's old age, is one of the keys to our century. A touchstone of modernity itself.

I have never been against new art as such; some of it is good, much is crap, most is somewhere in between.

But the existence of a cult does not mean that images appropriate to it automatically follow.

Confidence is the prize given to the mediocre