Political stress is always apt to shrink the private arena and attach it on to the public

Perhaps the rhinos and she-crocodiles whose gyrations between Mortimer's and East Hampton gives us our vision of social eminence today are content to entrust their faces to Andy Warhol's mingily cosmetic Polaroidising, but one would bet they would rather go to Sargent.

The desire to be primitive was very much a function of fin-de-siècle imperialism; it appealed to strong egos and domineering minds.

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt.

One thing is sure: the Sagrada Familia is the first Catholic temple whose bacon was ever saved by Shinto tourism. Not even Gaudi, who believed in miracles, could have forseen that.

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.

Most of the time they buy what other people buy. They move in great schools, like bluefish, all identical. There is safety in numbers. If one wants Schnabel, they all want Schnabel, if one buys a Keith Haring, two hundred Keith Harings will be sold.