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 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.

It is not possible to overstate the influence of Paul Cezanne on twentieth-century art. He's the modern Giotto someone who shattered one kind of picture-making and invented a new one that the world followed.

To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art - that is intimacy spirituality color aspiration towards the infinite expressed by every means available to the arts.

In its most limited sense modern art would seem to concern itself only with the technical innovations of the period.

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.

Skill without imagination is craftsmanship and gives us many useful objects such as wickerwork picnic baskets. Imagination without skill gives us modern art.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea.

There is a lot of interest in the arts music theatre filmmaking engineering architecture and software design. I think we have now transitioned the modern-day version of the entrepreneur into the creative economy.