A timeline that catalogues events that bear on pedagogy.

What does it mean to understand oneself within a specific juncture of AIDS history?

Nothing makes a community like a fucking disaster.

At this edge of legibility, we can find new language, frameworks, and tools.

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

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

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

The new tools ended up in the same old hands.

I collect what appears and feels like it belongs.

I always try to make choral films.

Making music is the only time I think.

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

If anything can destabilize our understanding of the individual author, or the individual artist, or the individual itself, it’s pedagogy.

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

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

I like things that are still in the making, still becoming. That’s why I’m an artist and not a historian.

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

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

Movements work when they have visions, representations, and mediations that sustain them over time.

We are forever circling the drain.

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

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

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

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

I like a more global view, and I like a larger field of action that’s not possible for most single practitioners.

Not having moments to grieve is a combination of raced, classed, and gendered positionality.

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

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

I came up in an era when social media made it feel like the content could be so viral that it marketed itself.

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

Blackness presents the possibility of a thoroughly anti-Idealist aesthetic and theory of objects.

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.

People betray themselves and others all the time.

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

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

You need to have a solid structure to doodle around.

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

I've never understood catharsis.

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

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

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

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

I'm interested in all the forces that liberate and constrict sound.

The body generates administration. And then there's the administration of the body.

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

The people attacking university education clearly haven’t spent time in a seminar.

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.

I’ve always seen photography as the route to being in trouble.

How do we labor to bring ourselves into the present?

Preparation gave way to intuition, and discipline gave way to process.

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

We need more art-thinking on campuses, and less fetishizing of positive knowledge.

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

I think of the diary as a form of queer writing, not from a place of identity, but from a place of intimacy.

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

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

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

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

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

I’m always looking at things and then asking: where’s culture headed and who are the prime movers?

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

I had always had in my head that criticism becomes criticism once it’s published.

Douglas’ insistence on emerging politically out of the confinement of being labeled a problem remains life-giving.

It was mind-blowing that someone had a word for what I actually wanted to become.

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

For a culture to function democratically, minority voices have to speak, and they have to be heard without being flattened or tokenized.

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

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

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.

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

I often say that Hollywood’s governed by conventional wisdom: it’s all convention, no wisdom.

I’d rather be in the hold with my folks than be free by myself.

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

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

‘Asian American’ identity may be a construction but the social and psychic life of racialized people in America is very real.

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

I like stories about people who are secretly intelligent.

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.

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

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

Play is a form of thinking.

I've only lived my gay sex life in English.

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

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

The art world runs on fads and amnesia.

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

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

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

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

Where’s the anti-aesthetic? The critique of practice is gone.

November is both a map and an archive of our cultural present and possible futures.

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

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

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

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

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

I've been erased from the official history of Semiotext(e).

Making work now, for me, is less about the execution of an idea. It is closer to the process of dreaming.

Anything that keeps us human, that keeps us connected, is meeting the moment.

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

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

I feel my intellectual life working when an idea that I’ve worked hard to understand suddenly becomes visible in the ordinary.

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

The art school industrial complex damages the immediacy, the efficacy, and the reach of art as something that is alive and culturally relevant.

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

There's something freeing about not owning every word.

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

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

I’m writing to anyone with a political imagination.

I’m a politically minded person, but I try to make character films.

The store was about conversations between worlds and how those conversations meshed together and only Sara could do that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I like to be precise.

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

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

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

It’s easy to recognize specters of Bataille’s thought today, for better and for worse.

It’s easy to recognize specters of Bataille’s thought today, for better and for worse.

The futurist California never happened—it was never tried.

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

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

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

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

I think the true artist is somebody who works from the heart.

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

What would ecological ethics be within artistic production?

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

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

If you want to criticize a system, you should understand how it actually works.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nothing stopped me from trying because I didn’t know what I was doing.

There is no more mysterious force than the act of storytelling.

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

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

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

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

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

Real education is a furtive, strange activity that involves huge amounts of boredom punctuated by moments of huge enlightenment.

Simulation faced the same unceremonious end as its referent.

I connect more with people who have mystery, who keep something private, who don't show everything.

Judgment implies experience and comparison, whereas taste is innate.

Arts pedagogy–both the teaching of art and the ways art educates us–makes apparent the unbreakable bond between art and the world.

When we opened the Hard Rock, we looked at it as our psychiatrist’s couch.

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

There is now a postmodernism cobbled together from these antecedents that hangs over contemporary culture.

We are believers in practice.

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

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

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

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

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

I still consider feminism and war resistance to be inseparable.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

It remains difficult to imagine an American avant-garde outside the publisher’s influential network.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You need to create a constellation of sources to really understand an artwork in its full dimensions.

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

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

The ecological is a sensibility.

There’s a resonance with certain recipes at different points—the very first thing I did with Martha Stewart Living was cookies.

Moore’s Law becomes so powerful, in fact, that people think it’s self-perpetuating. In a way, it is: it’s something that’s almost always in crisis.

I've never been someone who could be influenced very easily.

Sound allows us to both contract and expand the frame.

Torture and therapy here are not antipodal.

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

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

Her legacy isn’t lost, but continuously with us in various shapes and forms.

I learned more writing newsletters, prepping Facebook posts, and making magazines under deadline than from reading Heidegger.

They stood around, laughing, while drugs crumbled in their blood.

My approach to language is that theory doesn’t need to be a weapon.

I like to be both inside and outside.

Why be a tepid, conformist company gal when you can radiate?

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

I always say that when it comes to art criticism, the people who get the job are the people who want it.

It’s too easy to be curious, but not optimistic; or optimistic, but not curious.

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

At my core, what motivates me is curiosity.

What fantasy of salvation is left over for the writer?

Painting can only live if it wants to die.

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

Museums and galleries kind of train people in passivity.

I am a writer first, foremost, last and forever.