“To this day there is a noticeable reluctance on the part of native-born art lovers to admit that a quintessentially American composer like Aaron Copland might actually be great, or that a stage actor need not have an English accent to perform the plays of Shakespeare or Stoppard. Could it be that the reputation of John Marin, whose subject matter is as American as his briskly improvisational brushwork, suffers from our nagging sense of cultural inferiority?…”

“Mr. Welles’ problem was that he wanted it both ways. He was a perfectionist who expected his collaborators to sit around endlessly waiting for him to make up his mind–and to pay for all the overtime that he ran up along the way. Simon Callow, his biographer, has summed up this failing in one devastating sentence: ‘Any form of limitation, obligation, responsibility or enforced duty was intolerable to him, rendering him claustrophobic and destructive.’ That’s the wrong kind of perfectionism, and it led, as it usually does, to disaster…”

“Sure, I care about what works City Opera will perform next season. I care about who’ll be singing in them and who’ll be directing them. But in addition to answering the ‘what’ and ‘who’ questions, George Steel must take on the big ‘why’: New York already has one major opera company. Why does it need two? If he can’t come up with an answer to that question, then New York City Opera is doomed–and deserves to be…”

“It strikes me that instead of being ‘cautious’ not to ‘impose’ American values on a foreign culture, the museums of America should acknowledge that they have a unique responsibility to speak out on behalf of Ai Weiwei. They are, after all, trustees of the cultural heritage of mankind, which makes them by definition guardians of the universal values of civilization. Yet most of them are carefully looking the other way while China thumbs its nose at those same values by unlawfully imprisoning an artist. That’s not caution, it’s cowardice….”

“Force a writer to be brief and you force him to think clearly–if he can. No, I don’t think that War and Peace would have profited from being written in 140-character tweets. But I do think that our impatient age might just be getting the best out of a great many artists and thinkers who, left to their own devices, would never have learned how to cut to the chase…”

“High-culture unions that fight to hang on to an untenable status quo are shooting themselves in the head. Labor leaders invariably respond to managerial cries of disaster-around-the-corner by arguing that their members should not be made to suffer today for the managerial mistakes of the past. But in the end, it doesn’t matter who made the first blunder…”

“The reason artblogs caught on in the first place is that they frequently offered a sharper, better-informed alternative to the bland arts coverage published in regional newspapers–and that they were, to use a word coined by no less a journalistic authority than Joseph Pulitzer, ‘indegoddamnpendent.’ They still are, and that’s why people continue to read them. It remains to be seen whether any institutional blog will ever pack that kind of punch…”

“What do you think of when you hear the word ‘genius’? Most of us, I suspect, picture a fellow in a white coat who squints into a microscope, twiddles a knob, and says, “Eureka! I’ve found the cure for cancer!” More often than not, though, scientific and creative discoveries are the result not of bolts of mental lightning but of long stretches of painfully hard slogging…”