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.

I often find myself privately stewing about much British art thinking that except for their tremendous gardens that the English are not primarily visual artists and are in nearly unsurpassable ways literary.

Early-twentieth-century abstraction is art's version of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. It's the idea that changed everything everywhere: quickly decisively for good.

Works of art often last forever or nearly so. But exhibitions themselves especially gallery exhibitions are like flowers they bloom and then they die then exist only as memories or pressed in magazines and books.

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.

Willem de Kooning is generally credited for coming out of the painterly gates strong in the forties revolutionizing art and abstraction and reaching incredible heights by the early fifties and then tailing off.

Imagine it's 1981. You're an artist in love with art smitten with art history. You're also a woman with almost no mentors to look to art history just isn't that into you. Any woman approaching art history in the early eighties was attempting to enter an almost foreign country a restricted and exclusionary domain that spoke a private language.

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.

First there is the bare beauty of the logs themselves with their long lines and firm curves. Then there is the open charm felt of the structural features which are not hidden under plaster and ornament but are clearly revealed a charm felt in Japanese architecture.

Post-Modernism was a reaction against Modernism. It came quite early to music and literature and a little later to architecture. And I think it's still coming to computer science.