I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history that he redefined the idea of beauty that he combined painting sculpture photography and everyday life with such gall and that he was interested in as he put it 'the ability to conceive failure as progress.'

In my world history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting a play a song or a poem that speaks of the event.

I just like art. I get pure pleasure from it. I have a lot of wonderful paintings and every time I look at them I see something different.

One of the main reasons I am so drawn to Hitchcock is that he planned his shots way in advance on story-boards which he designed like classic paintings (he was an art connoisseur). It's why he found shooting on set boring - because he had already composed the film in his head.

All art is exorcism. I paint dreams and visions too the dreams and visions of my time. Painting is the effort to produce order order in yourself. There is much chaos in me much chaos in our time.

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera theater music and dance are thriving all over the world but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

At the beginning of the 20th century the ambition of the great painters was to make paintings that were like music which was then considered as the noblest art.

The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression whether they are paintings sculptures tragedies or musical compositions.

Kinkade's paintings are worthless schmaltz and the lamestream media that love him are wrong. However I'd love to see a museum mount a small show of Kinkade's work. I would like the art world and the wider world to argue about him in public out in the open.

Kinkade estimated that one of his paintings hung in every twenty homes in America. Yet the art world unanimously ignores or reviles him. Me included.

A sad fact of life lately at the Museum of Modern Art is that when it comes to group shows of contemporary painting from the collection the bar has been set pretty low.

It's great that New York has large spaces for art. But the enormous immaculate box has become a dated even oppressive place. Many of these spaces were designed for sprawling installations large paintings and the Relational Aesthetics work of the past fifteen years.

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.

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946 when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.

I also take pleasure in the so-called negative power in Grotjahn's work. That is I love his paintings for what they are not. Unlike much art of the past decade Grotjahn isn't simply working from a prescribed checklist of academically acceptable curator-approved 'isms' and twists.

These days newish art can be priced between $10 000 and $25 000. When I tell artists that a new painting by a newish artist should go for around $1 200 they look at me like I'm a flesh-eating virus.

Poor Georgia O'Keeffe. Death didn't soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings.

I am more a friend of art than a producer of painting.

The trend in some of the contemporary movements in art but by no means all seems to deny this ideal and to me appears to lead to a purely decorative conception of painting.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

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.

I realize that protest paintings are not exactly in vogue but I've done many.

I think of my peace paintings as one long poem with each painting being a single stanza.

A painting that is well composed is half finished.