Art Is Life: Icons and Iconoclasts, Visionaries and Vigilantes, and Flashes of Hope in the Night

Art is two parts agency and one part inner heat. The artist loves going down rabbit holes, working toward and against something at the same time, translating sensory and extrasensory impressions that all have their own sovereignty or joy, each of them on a journey to bring something back from a personal underworld, to build a new body out of dispar

The most moving art, as always, deals in ambiguity, unexpected surprises, undermined expectations, complexity, interior drama.

The elemental power and poetry of Géricault’s Medusa changed me forever. It told me things that I’ve known and lived by ever since.

artist is a sort of Dr. Frankenstein, transmuting the rules of nature and the material world, memory, influence, culture, and tradition, trying to bring something new and unknown to life.

All art is a kind of exorcism. This is what gives art its power to change the conditions of our life.

Art can be talisman or comfort,

Art is the greatest operating system our species has ever invented, a means of exploring consciousness, seen and unseen worlds. It is an instrument, medium, matrix, or miracle that transforms old impressions into new thoughts; that makes a thousand insignificant details light up and draw you out. For many of us, it is another country, a new home.

it also exerts an ancient force that gives me access to a place where things are more than the sums of their parts, where—in violation of all natural law—objects give off more energy than went into their making.