In America, nostalgia for things is apt to set in before they go.

We've got a recipe for disaster. It's huge -- this combination of body image issues and the drug's weight loss appeal.

One gets tired of the role critics are supposed to have in this culture: It's like being the piano player in a whorehouse; you don't have any control over the action going on upstairs.

What we need more of is slow art: art that holds time as a vase holds water: art that grows out of modes of perception and making whose skill and doggedness make you think and feel; art that isn’t merely sensational, that doesn’t get its message across in ten seconds, that isn’t falsely iconic, that hooks onto something deep-running in our natures. In a word, art that is the very opposite of mass media.

Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius.

Why wait for a call when you have a command?

Modernism is the protein of our cultural imagination.