People have often asked if I'm gay because I don't go out of my way to spit and scratch and give people attitude.

Chaotic people often have chaotic lives and I think they create that. But if you try and have an inner peace and a positive attitude I think you attract that.

Having a clear faith based on the creed of the church is often labeled today as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism which is letting oneself be tossed and swept along by every wind of teaching look like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards.

I've sort of escaped my background as people often do through art and culture.

Fashion often starts off beautiful and becomes ugly whereas art starts off ugly sometimes and becomes beautiful.

Because most of my career in the classroom has been at art schools (beginning at Bennington in the 1970s) I am hyper-aware of the often grotesque disconnect between commentary on the arts and the actual practice or production of the arts.

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.

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.

Many museums are drawing audiences with art that is ostensibly more entertaining than stuff that just sits and invites contemplation. Interactivity gizmos eating hanging out things that make noise - all are now the norm often edging out much else.

Poor Georgia O'Keeffe. Death didn't soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings.