The forties, seventies, and the nineties, when money was scarce, were great periods, when the art world retracted but it was also reborn.

Robert Rauschenberg was not a giant of American art he was the giant. No American created so many aesthetic openings for so many artists.

The Met is not only the finest encyclopedic museum of art in the United States it is arguably the finest anywhere.

Money is something that can be measured art is not. It is all subjective.

Contrary to popular opinion, things do not go stale particularly fast in the art world.

Art usually only makes the news in America when the subject is money.

I hate art auctions.

The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is, can do, or is worth on an existential, alchemical level.

To me, nothing in the art world is neutral. The idea of disinterest strikes me as boring, dishonest, dubious, and uninteresting.

The art world is an all-volunteer force. No one has to be here if he or she Does not want to be, and we should be associating with anyone we want to.

Wolfgang Tillman stunning large-scale pictures, being shown for the first time, were so offhand I failed to see them as art.

Galleries began growing in both number and size in the late seventies, when artists who worked in lofts wanted to exhibit their work in spaces similar to the ones the art was made in.

There is 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.

First let me report that the art in the Barnes Collection has never looked better. My trips to the old Barnes were always amazing, but except on the sunniest days, you could barely see the art. The building always felt pushed beyond its capacity.

Not to say people shouldn't get rich from art. I adore the alchemy wherein artists who cast a complex spell make rich people give them their money. (Just writing it makes me cackle.) But too many artists have been making money without magic.

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 am a flesh-eating virus.

In art, scandal is a false narrative, a smoke screen that camouflages rather than reveals. When we do not know what we are seeing, we overreact.

Damien Hirst is the Elvis of the English art world, its ayatollah, deliverer, and big-thinking entrepreneurial potty-mouthed prophet and front man. Hirst synthesizes punk, Pop Art, Jeff Koons, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, and Catholicism.

Anyone who relishes art should love the extraordinary diversity and psychic magic of our art galleries. There is 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.

Yes, 85 percent of the art you see is not any good. But everyone has a different opinion about which 85 percent is bad. That in turn creates fantastically unstable interplay and argument.