A determined soul will do more with a rusty monkey wrench than a loafer will accomplish with all the tools in a machine shop.
A Gustave Courbet portrait of a trout has more death in it than Rubens could get in a whole Crucifixion.
An ideal museum show would be a mating of Brideshead Revisited with House and Garden. provoking intense and pleasurable nostalgia for a past that none of its audience has had.
Distanced from the work by crowds and railings, they may listen on their Acoustiguides to the plummy vowels of the Met's director, Philippe de Montebello, discoursing like an undertaker on the merits of the deceased.
It was a secular cathedral, dedicated to the rites of travel.
It was the basilica of gossip, the Vatican of inside dope.
Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.
"Less is more, and Moore is a bore" was what one heard from English art students.
Matisses and Miro's hung transfixed like rabbits in the glare of spotlights.
Most of the untranscribed and unpublished manuscripts in the book popped out of boxes at me when I wasn't looking for them; I picked them up out of the corner of my eye.
Nothing they design ever gets in the way of a work of art.
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.
Popular in our time, unpopular in his. So runs the stereotype of rejected genius.
The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
The new job of art is to sit on the wall and get more expensive.
The prisons are the monuments of Australia - the Paestums of an extraordinary time - an effort to exile en masse a whole class.
The protein of our cultural imagination.
Transportation made sublimation literal. It conveyed evil to another world.
Woven through these galleries are some of the most deliriously awful canvases of the 19th century high-finance porn of the ripest sort.
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