"'Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era,' the Whitney Museum's 40th-anniversary trip down counterculture memory lane, provides moments of buzzy fun, but it'll leave you only comfortably numb. For starters, it may be the whitest, straightest, most conservative show seen in a New York museum since psychedelia was new."

"Clear thinking requires courage even more than intellect. For where clarity resides, peace inevitably follows."

"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."

"Wolfgang Tillman's stunning large-scale pictures, being shown for the first time, were so offhand I failed to see them as art."

"I have a soft spot for art that, in terms of subject matter and material, is in bad taste."

"The imminent demise of the large record companies as gatekeepers of the world's popular music is a good thing, for the most part."

"It is a quiet truth that art is the soul's attempt to give enduring form to the formless — an essential principle for the reflective life."

"No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did, he would cease to be an artist."