I think of art at its most significant as a DEW line a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

A primary function of art and thought is to liberate the individual from the tyranny of his culture in the environmental sense and to permit him to stand beyond it in an autonomy of perception and judgment.

I have never denied my background or my culture. I have taught my child to embrace her Mexican heritage to love my first language Spanish to learn about Mexican history music folk art food and even the Mexican candy I grew up with.

If the Frieze Art Fair catches on I imagine at least two great things happening. First we will once again have a huge art fair in town that isn't too annoying to go to. More importantly Frieze may finally show New Yorkers that we can cross our own waters for visual culture. That would change everything.

'Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era ' the Whitney Museum's 40th-anniversary trip down counterculture memory lane provides moments of buzzy fun but it'll leave you only comfortably numb. For starters it may be the whitest straightest most conservative show seen in a New York museum since psychedelia was new.

My culture-deprived aspirational mother dragged me once a month from our northern suburb - where the word art never came up - to the Art Institute of Chicago. I hated it.

It is a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.

If art is to nourish the roots of our culture society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.