“It's my guess that those cutting-edge artists who attack tradition secretly believe tradition will survive to enshrine them as the wild and crazy geniuses who destroyed it”
“I've never understood why artists, who so often condescend to the cliches of their own culture, are so eager to embrace the cliches of cultures they know nothing about.”
“A lot of artists say they'd be happy in a classless society. But artists are often the first to deceive themselves. Put them in the kind of utopia they sentimentalize, and in no time, they would be binding their feet, lengthening their necks or flattening their heads, just to be different.”
“Many of the contradictions in Postmodern art come from the fact that we're trying to be artists in a democratic society. This is because in a democracy, the ideal is compromise. In art, it isn't.”
“In the nineteenth century the camera made a realist of the man on the street. Now the computer can make anybody a desktop Cubist. Technology may or may not be destiny, but I doubt that machines will replace art any more than wheels have replaced feet.”
“It is every artist's fantasy to run things. I know personally, I'd be happiest as dictator of a small island. The problem is that romantic artists are usually too disorganized to run their own lives, let alone societies. And most societies are too sensible to let them try it.”
“Many people have observed that truth is stranger than fiction. This has led some intellectuals to conclude that it's stranger than non-fiction as well.”
