It is an oldish question, but not perhaps a very interesting one, whether cooking is an art or not.

It was the basilica of gossip, the Vatican of inside dope.

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt; perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.

The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling, and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you, and in this way pass from feeling to meaning. It's not something that committees can do. It's not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It's done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.

Why should we expect modernist taste to be any smarter than premodernist or postmodernist?

In art there is no progress, only fluctuations of intensity.

Modernism is the protein of our cultural imagination.