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“I like to be precise.”

Lucinda Childs

“I still place great stock in the unconscious and the sense that we never know ourselves fully.”

Mary Cappello

“Without a critical mass of art criticism and debate, you may have something that looks like art but it won’t feel like art.”

Ben Davis

“Modernist architecture wasn’t about grappling with the past. It was about working with an entirely different set of criteria.”

Phyllis Lambert

“I’m focused on creating dialogues to address the challenges of our time.”

Hans Ulrich Obrist

“Without doubt, you start believing your own importance. That’s the real danger.”

Barbara Kruger

“Judgment implies experience and comparison, whereas taste is innate.”

Paula Cooper

“I like the deep, deep, deep understanding of the technology of the body that only ballet has.”

Karole Armitage

“My whole struggle was being suspicious of the idea that subjectivity and the creative imagination are what makes art, art.”

Charles Gaines

“A lot of people are winning at winning, but they’re not necessarily winning at art.”

Arthur Jafa

“Writing has to feel like the appointment you were meant to keep.”

Rachel Kushner

“The important thing alphabetizing did for me was it got rid of chronological time.”

Sheila Heti

“I never know if a restaurant is going to work until it’s open for business.”

Keith McNally

“Aging provides a whole new, though limited, range of motion.”

Yvonne Rainer

“Sometimes, the machinations of power are so obvious or overdetermined that our time is better spent looking askew.”

Irene V. Small

“There’s always some kind of freedom even in the most horrible circumstances.”

Ariana Reines

“I think in terms of mega structures. I work out the form and then begin to fill it in.”

Robert Wilson

“I always knew that the only kind of journalist I was going to be was a critic.”

Margo Jefferson

“For me, this is the power of Ailey: that a dance exhibition would also have to be an exhibition about cultural history.”

Adrienne Edwards

“I use painting, but I’m not a painter.”

Glenn Ligon

“I’ve always seen photography as the route to being in trouble. When people aren’t mad at me, I’m surprised.”

Collier Schorr

“At a certain point I couldn’t bear the work ‘on behalf of’—the condition of thinking for some other person.”

William Kentridge

“I don’t think that it’s impossible to live a full life without cooking, but if you want to eat well, you have to cook.”

Claire Saffitz

“We realized that living your life on the internet kind of sucks.”

Kyle Chayka

“The humanities are in the process of either elimination or repackaging into revenue-generating digital enterprises.”

Jonathan Crary

“I think the future’s invented more by mistakes than it is by design.”

Jefferson Hack

“We had three seasons to figure out how to make Industry on an HBO budget.”

Mickey Down and Konrad Kay

“I’m most interested in making form work harder and in service of subject matter.”

Garrett Bradley

“I didn’t know how to be socially, but I understood sex.”

Mary Gaitskill

“I love the idea of following one mind as it bobs and weaves around.”

Doreen St. Félix

“I am one of those feminists who concentrates on what we did accomplish rather than what we didn’t.”

Vivian Gornick

“People betray themselves and others all the time.”

Brandon Taylor

“Critique is a tool for understanding, but it’s not the end of the process.”

Olivia Laing

“Performance often involves finding new information in the process of creating.”

Diamanda Galás

“In the world of design, it’s not only beneficial to be a generalist, but necessary.”

Marc Newson

“I didn’t know what the rules were, but then I learned that there weren’t any.”

Oneohtrix Point Never

“Borders are just a nuisance and an obstacle, but now we have to live with them.”

Marcel Kurpershoek

“Museums and galleries kind of train people in passivity.”

Yxta Maya Murray

“You need to have a solid structure to doodle around.”

Caroline Polachek

“Withholding is not about opacity or refusal, it is about participating on one’s own terms.”

Alper Turan

“We have a sense of solidarity, not only across any social, political, or cultural differences, but across time.”

Fierce Pussy

“Most of my books are, at heart, me banging my head against a brick wall.”

Robert Glück

“For the men who died before us, we are definitely the generation that they were praying for.”

Brontez Purnell

“The way you walk out of Plato’s cave is through the removal of judgment and the practice of acceptance.”

Jeff Koons

“I think that there’s actually a dumb optimism in a lot of what I do.”

Hua Hsu

“I’ve never been interested in being consumed by the joke.”

B.J. Novak

“I couldn’t help but notice that other critics weren’t at the Pyramid Club or 8BC at 2 in the morning.”

Cynthia Carr

“I’ve never felt quite like a woman because I disobeyed.”

Lynne Tillman

“Punk is that freedom to do it yourself, even if it’s sloppy and messy.”

Marcel Dzama

“Sound allows us to both contract and expand the frame.”

Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler

“Everyone told me not to move to Los Angeles because there was no money for art.”

Michael Govan

“A corporation is a way to disappear, to have impunity. It’s a legitimate kind of thuggery.”

Bernadette Corporation

“Play is a form of thinking.”

Harmony Holiday

“I’ve been erased from the official history of Semiotext(e).”

Jim Fleming

“I’ve never been able to fully commit to the art world.”

Chris Kraus

“I would get bored only talking to celebrities for the rest of my life.”

David Marchese

“Comedy is just as much timing and sound as it is space and distance.”

Celeste Yim

“I’m not at all a left-wing melancholic.”

Susan Buck-Morss

“What would ecological ethics be within artistic production?”

Martin Beck

“Novelists are always living in an alternative universe. One walks back and forth through a gossamer curtain.”

Lorrie Moore

“I want to refuse modes of interpretation that are ultimately aimed at putting the art object to work.”

Rizvana Bradley

“I’ve realized that my work is about claiming monumentality through something more temporal.”

Nora Turato

“Season one of The Bear was a punk song. It was like a punch in the mouth. Season two is an album.”

Lionel Boyce

“Math calms me in a way nothing else does—by not calculating, I realized I’d starved my brain of oxygen.”

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

“I do not know why Less Than Zero has stuck around. It actually has outstayed its welcome.”

Bret Easton Ellis

“That’s the driving force in my work: what if this world didn’t have to be the world?”

Suneil Sanzgiri

“All I had at that time was a headshot and a resume full of lies.”

Michael Imperioli

“I’m perhaps most of all interested in a sense of disorientation, and of not knowing.”

Ishmael Houston-Jones

“Style, to me, means there’s something happening on the exterior that suggests an interesting interior.”

Rachel Tashjian

“I don’t think I’ve ever had ambition, but I’ve had drive.”

Devonté Hynes

“I don’t come to this book as a parent; I come to this book as a descendant.”

Sara Marcus

“I like stories about people who are secretly intelligent.”

Gus Van Sant

“When you’re working in a journalistic framework, you’re going to be making the donuts and you may like the donuts but you did not design the donuts.”

Sasha Frere-Jones

“I do wonder whether it is such a good idea to make trauma the center of political demands.”

Jackie Wang

“Like a worm or octopus, a novel can have more than one heart.”

Ben Lerner

“Goethe remarked, back in the 18th century, that a man of 50 knows no more than a man of 20; they just know different things.”

Samuel R. Delany

“You have to learn not to worry about what people are going to think of you personally.”

Sigrid Nunez

“We can’t walk in anyone else’s shoes. Maybe the goal—not just of art, but also of being here—is to walk beside one another.”

Savanah Leaf

“Lineages that focus only on proper-named artists are not only Eurocentric and masculinist but plain boring.”

Julia Bryan-Wilson

“An individual painting, it ends on kind of a period. Whereas a body of work ends with a question.”

Lisa Yuskavage

“The most generative thing you can do as a writer is to go out and see other people’s work.”

Stephanie LaCava

“It was a lot easier to be yourself before the Internet, before you were constantly being shown what the other possibilities were.”

Alison Roman

“For me, the life of theory has been shaped by the experience of untimely loss.”

Lee Edelman

“That was the cleverness of Andy’s business structure: you could be the editor of Interview if you could figure out how to pay for it.”

Bob Colacello

“Something lived-in and repaired in a beautiful way is itself beautiful.”

Matthew Williams

“Why should I be reading something that isn’t going to change or influence me to have a new feeling?”

Ottessa Moshfegh

“Critical theory, not art or architecture, was the avant-garde of that time.”

Hal Foster

“Activism can be, and often has been, about bringing dignity to life and death.”

Theodore (ted) Kerr

“I think the hardest thing as an artist is to find form for your questions.”

Ann Hamilton

“These terms—‘What do we own?’; ‘What is the same?’—were among the modes of address floating around at the time and seemed to fit.”

Flue-ed Times

“I’m not interested in just looking but in having an experience and then expanding from there.”

Senga Nengudi

“The ability to self-represent is crucial; it is the first condition of possibility for any kind of representation.”

Denise Ferreira da Silva

“The futurist California never happened—it was never tried.”

Malcolm Harris

“I’ve never been someone who could be influenced very easily.”

Sylvia Plimack Mangold

“I’m always cognizant of life being the most interesting thing, and writing coming out of that.”

Emma Cline

“I’ve only lived my gay sex life in English.”

Hedi El Kholti

“Painting can only live if it wants to die.”

Yve-Alain Bois

“What does it mean to problematize your own memory or your own sense of self?”

Hua Hsu

“My body, your body, was already implicated in the zero degree of painting from day one.”

Adrienne Edwards

“I had the most boring job of all of my friends who were working in the early days of Hip-hop.”

Thelma Golden

“I have always wanted to fight cultural amnesia, and I don’t know how we do that without museums.”

Stuart Comer

“I’m writing to anyone with a political imagination.”

Keller Easterling

“There is this moment when you have to reject everything in order to push yourself forward.”

Laurie Simmons

“I like a kind of writing that’s irreducible—just itself and nothing else.”

Lucy Sante

“I think we need to de-frame art and let it be free.”

Hilton Als

“I spent my youth in a world of women who were, and who insisted to be, witnesses to the fate of women.”

Hélène Cixous

“What matters is not only the writing of time as history but the writing processes of technologies.”

Jussi Parikka

“All my life I’d been having arguments with myself that I couldn’t properly solve within the jurisdiction of myself.”

Lucy Sante

“I’m interested in all the forces that liberate and constrict sound.”

Christoph Cox

“Trans women have never had an ongoing, well-documented, accessible, aesthetically varied, interracial culture.”

McKenzie Wark

“My work is about staging and confronting our reality with fiction.”

Dan Graham

“I like to be both inside and outside.”

Tom Burr

“The ecological is a sensibility.”

Susan Schuppli

“There’s something freeing about not owning every word.”

K Allado-McDowell

“People sometimes thought I cared more about myself than I did.”

Lena Dunham

“I was already the enemy to a lot of the activists, because I wasn’t representing gays in a positive way.”

Dennis Cooper

“If I ever reached a milestone I would run away in horror.”

Hito Steyerl

“We could say that the entire enterprise of art has a gimmick problem.”

Sianne Ngai

“My attention tends to focus on the micro, on what’s right in front of my face—I let associations spiral out from there.”

Dodie Bellamy

“I decided to schmear my queer Jewish pinko self in schmaltz and go out and grease up the stage.”

Gregg Bordowitz

“I can’t think of architecture as anything other than a performative art form.”

Elizabeth Diller

“Sacrifice is a pointed instance of dépense, an exquisitely sacred combustion, and one that runs throughout Bataille’s economics.”

Michael Taussig

“L’informe comes out of WWII, the atomic bomb, and the Holocaust.”

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

“At the core, I think of my creative language as being rather formless.”

Matthew Barney

“I experienced my transness as a shape the Internet made when it looked at me.”

Andrea Long Chu

“The idea of three-act structure is in my head a lot, destroying my stories before they really begin.”

Amie Barrodale

“We don’t need to go beyond blackness. It’s not a before and after question.”

John Akomfrah

“Even though I don’t see criticism as art, I don’t see it as secondary to art. I see it as a practice parallel to it.”

Hal Foster

“There will be gradual changes in the art world, but the arts are often the last to change.”

Howardena Pindell

“Architecture is not about the wellbeing of humans at all. It doesn’t simply house the human, it remakes the human.”

Mark Wigley

“One mantra in particular strikes me in this moment—and it is from John Waters’s Female Trouble—‘crime is beauty.’”

Mimi Thi Nguyen

“The modern manifestation of the museum has its origins as a colonial and disciplining institution.”

Ruba Katrib

“Things improving for old women artists is like things improving for Black Americans. Things improve. But things stay shitty.”

Nell Painter

“Historically, queer women have been on the front lines of every progressive movement, but not always openly.”

Sarah Schulman

“The paradigmatic Hongkonger, especially from the generations between 1949 and 1997, is transnational and neoliberal.”

Christopher K. Ho

“The essential antagonism is not between the workers and bosses but between the Humans and the Blacks.”

Frank B. Wilderson III

“When living honorably is more important than staying alive, you’re ready to fight effectively for what you believe in.”

Adrian Piper

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