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

Drawing never dies, it holds on by the skin of its teeth, because the hunger it satisfies – the desire for an active, investigative, manually vivid relation with the things we see and yearn to know about – is apparently immortal.

Modernism is the protein of our cultural imagination.

The World's Fair audience tended to think of the machine as unqualifiedly good, strong, stupid and obedient. They thought of it as a giant slave, an untiring steel Negro, controlled by Reason in a world of infinite resources.

The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.

Works of art... do not force meanings on their audience; meaning emerges, adds up, unfolds from their imagined centres... takes one through the process of discovering meaning.

What has our culture lost in 1980 that the avant-garde had in 1890? Ebullience, idealism, confidence, the belief that there was plenty of territory to explore, and above all the sense that art, in the most disinterested and noble way, could find the necessary metaphors by which a radically changing culture could be explained to its inhabitants.