Many art-worlders have an if-you-say-so approach to art: Everyone is so scared of missing out on the next hot artist that it's never clear whether people are liking work because they like it or because other people do. Everyone is keeping up with the Joneses and there are more Joneses than ever.

Artistic qualities that once seemed undeniable don't seem so now. Sometimes these fluctuations are only fickleness of taste momentary glitches in an artist's work or an artist getting ahead of his audience (it took me ten years to catch up to Albert Oehlen). Other times however these problems mean there's something wrong with the art.

Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you'll find it. It's there in paintings of photographs photographs of advertising sculpture with ready-made objects videos using already-existing film.

Anyone who relishes art should love the extraordinary diversity and psychic magic of our art galleries. There's likely more combined square footage for the showing of art on one New York block - West 24th Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues - than in all of Amsterdam's or Hamburg's galleries.

There's something pleasing about large well-lit spaces. I love that dealers are willing to take massive chances in order to give this much room to their artists. Most of all I love that more galleries showing more art gives more artists a shot.

Don't be an art critic. Paint. There lies salvation.

Music is your own experience your own thoughts your wisdom. If you don't live it it won't come out of your horn. They teach you there's a boundary line to music. But man there's no boundary line to art.

Design is the method of putting form and content together. Design just as art has multiple definitions there is no single definition. Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple that's why it is so complicated.

People believe that photographs are true and therefore cannot be art.

Art is why I get up in the morning but my definition ends there. You know I don't think its fair that I'm living for something I can't even define.

I'm enamored with the art world. Anytime you look at anything that's considered artistic there's a commercial world around it: the ballet opera any kind of music. It can't exist without it.

There's a lot of thought in art. People get to talk about important things. There's a lot of sex you know in art. There's a lot of naked women and men and there's intrigue there's fakery. It's a real microcosm of the larger world.

Wherever the art of medicine is loved there is also a love of humanity.

Besides the noble art of getting things done there is the noble art of leaving things undone. The wisdom of life consists in the elimination of non-essentials.

There are worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man beyond history and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and the revelations of great art are equally difficult to define we can grasp them only in the depths of our perceptive spirit.

In science as in art and as I believe in every other sphere of human activity there may be wisdom in a multitude of counsellors but it is only in one or two of them.

There is no prejudice that the work of art does not finally overcome.

There is nothing Sir too little for so little a creature as man. It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.

There is nothing in the world of art like the songs mother used to sing.

I realised the bohemian life was not for me. I would look around at my friends living like starving artists and wonder 'Where's the art?' They weren't doing anything. And there was so much interesting stuff to do so much fun to be had... maybe I could even quit renting.

What I've discovered is that in art as in music there's a lot of truth-and then there's a lie. The artist is essentially creating his work to make this lie a truth but he slides it in amongst all the others. The tiny little lie is the moment I live for my moment. It's the moment that the audience falls in love.

There is nothing new in art except talent.

When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock a flower the branch of a tree or my hand - as a final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing man cannot make the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two it's bad art.

There is no abstract art. You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.