It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. ... All photographs are memento mori. To take photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time's relentless melt

Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.

The decline of education in North America and I suppose in Western Europe makes it harder to have a common body of references.

Though collecting quotations could be considered as merely an ironic mimetism

Art today is a new kind of instrument, an instrument for modifying consciousness and organizing new modes of sensibility . . . . Artists have had to become self-conscious aestheticians: continually challenging their means, their materials and methods.

Art is not only about something; it is something. A work of art is a thing in the world, not just a text or commentary on the world.

We are told we must choose - the old or the new. In fact, we must choose both. What is a life if not a series of negotiations between the old and the new?