I think of art at its most significant as a DEW line a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

I have never denied my background or my culture. I have taught my child to embrace her Mexican heritage to love my first language Spanish to learn about Mexican history music folk art food and even the Mexican candy I grew up with.

If the Frieze Art Fair catches on I imagine at least two great things happening. First we will once again have a huge art fair in town that isn't too annoying to go to. More importantly Frieze may finally show New Yorkers that we can cross our own waters for visual culture. That would change everything.

'Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era ' the Whitney Museum's 40th-anniversary trip down counterculture memory lane provides moments of buzzy fun but it'll leave you only comfortably numb. For starters it may be the whitest straightest most conservative show seen in a New York museum since psychedelia was new.

My culture-deprived aspirational mother dragged me once a month from our northern suburb - where the word art never came up - to the Art Institute of Chicago. I hated it.

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.

Culture is the arts elevated to a set of beliefs.

If you do not breathe through writing if you do not cry out in writing or sing in writing then don't write because our culture has no use for it.

I acquired an admiration for Japanese culture art and architecture and learned of the existence of the game of GO which I still play.

Information and inspiration are everywhere... history art architecture everything an illustrator needs. Europe is after all the land that has generated most of the enduring myths and legends of Western culture.

The intellectual force of the West is still dominant but other cultures are getting stronger. I expect that we will develop a new way of thinking in architecture and urban planning and that less will be based on our models.

Spiritual space is lost in gaining convenience. I saw the need to create a mixture of Japanese spiritual culture and modern western architecture.

Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.

When you look at Japanese traditional architecture you have to look at Japanese culture and its relationship with nature. You can actually live in a harmonious close contact with nature - this very unique to Japan.

Noble life demands a noble architecture for noble uses of noble men. Lack of culture means what it has always meant: ignoble civilization and therefore imminent downfall.

The greatest advances of civilization whether in architecture or painting in science and literature in industry or agriculture have never come from centralized government.

As a culture I see us as presently deprived of subtleties. The music is loud the anger is elevated sex seems lacking in sweetness and privacy.

The great thing about celebrity culture is that they can't seem to stop themselves from displaying their ridiculous behaviour. I feel it's my job as a serious investigative journalist to witness all kinds of behaviour and then report back to the audience through the prism of my own anger and bitterness.

Quite a lot of our contemporary culture is actually shot through with a resentment of limits and the passage of time anger at what we can't do fear or even disgust at growing old.

It's just amazing to do something that's part of a pop culture phenomenon.