The art world can be very intimidating because it's just so vast. You talk to people who are really clued in to all the young artists and coming into it you're never going to be able to catch up immediately even though there's pressure to.
The smart thing in the art world is to have one good idea and never have another.
Jazz is known all over the world as an American musical art form and that's it. No America no jazz. I've seen people try to connect it to other countries for instance to Africa but it doesn't have a damn thing to do with Africa.
In the first book of my Discworld series published more than 26 years ago I introduced Death as a character there was nothing particularly new about this - death has featured in art and literature since medieval times and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.
Of course art world ethics are important. But museums are no purer than any other institution or business. Academics aren't necessarily more high-minded than gallerists.
Many say an art dealer running a museum is a 'conflict of interest.' But maybe the art world has lived an artificial or unintentional lie all of these years when it comes to conflicts of interest.
I love art dealers. In some ways they're my favorite people in the art world. Really. I love that they put their money where their taste is create their own aesthetic universes support artists employ people and do all of this while letting us see art for free. Many are visionaries.
Art is for anyone. It just isn't for everyone. Still over the past decade its audience has hugely grown and that's irked those outside the art world who get irritated at things like incomprehensibility or money.
Kinkade's paintings are worthless schmaltz and the lamestream media that love him are wrong. However I'd love to see a museum mount a small show of Kinkade's work. I would like the art world and the wider world to argue about him in public out in the open.
The reason the art world doesn't respond to Kinkade is because none - not one - of his ideas about subject-matter surface color composition touch scale form or skill is remotely original. They're all cliche and already told.
Kinkade estimated that one of his paintings hung in every twenty homes in America. Yet the art world unanimously ignores or reviles him. Me included.
Everyone goes to the same exhibitions and the same parties stays in the same handful of hotels eats at the same no-star restaurants and has almost the same opinions. I adore the art world but this is copycat behavior in a sphere that prides itself on independent thinking.
Many art-worlders have an if-you-say-so approach to art: Everyone is so scared of missing out on the next hot artist that it's never clear whether people are liking work because they like it or because other people do. Everyone is keeping up with the Joneses and there are more Joneses than ever.
'Untitled' is a time machine that can transport you to 1992 an edgy moment when the art world was crumbling money was scarce and artists like Tiravanija were in the nascent stages of combining Happenings performance art John Cage Joseph Beuys and the do-it-yourself ethos of punk. Meanwhile a new art world was coming into being.
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.
When money and hype recede from the art world one thing I won't miss will be what curator Francesco Bonami calls the 'Eventocracy.' All this flashy 'art-fair art' and those highly produced space-eating spectacles and installations wow you for a minute until you move on to the next adrenaline event.
While a large segment of the art world has obsessed over a tiny number of stars and their prices an aesthetic shift has been occurring. It's not a movement - movements are more sure of themselves. It's a change of mood or expectation a desire for art to be more than showy effects big numbers and gamesmanship.