It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino's work. From the time I first saw his art in the mid-eighties I almost always dismissed it as mannered Romantic formulaic conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction.

A canon is antithetical to everything the New York art world has been about for the past 40 years during which we went from being the center of the art world to being one of many centers.

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.

Can space break? I mean the space of art galleries. Over the past 100 years art galleries have gone from looking like Beaux Arts salons to simple storefronts to industrial lofts to the gleaming giant white cubes of Chelsea with their shiny concrete floors.

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.

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.

The style of ancient Egyptian art is transcendently clear something 8-year-olds can recognize in an instant. Its consistency and codification is one of the most epic visual journeys in all art one that lasts 30 dynasties spread over 3 000 years.

When science art literature and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible which can make a man's name live for thousands of years.

I've always liked traveling around Europe and seeing the architecture. The buildings in capital cities have been there for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. Some look better than the new ones.

I could be happy doing something like architecture. It would involve another couple of years of graduate school but that's what I studied in college. That's what I always wanted to do.