The Museum of Modern Love

Art will wake you up. Art will break your heart. There will be glorious days. If you want eternity, you must be fearless.

Art creates a certain familiarity with loneliness. And possibly with pain. Physical, mental, it doesn’t really matter. It’s all a catalyst. I don’t like to admit that because it’s depressing, but in truth pain is the stone that art sharpens itself on time after time.

Life beats down and crushes the soul, and art reminds you that you have one. Stella Adler

The woman in red was surrounded by the crowd and she was alone. It was utterly public but intensely private.

You would be amazed how rare it is for artists to feel moments of true satisfaction. When they’re inside their craft, inside colour or movement or sound, words or clay or pictures or dance, when they submit to the art, that is when they know two things—the void that is life and the pull that is death. The grand and the hollow. The best reflects that. To be such harbingers of truth is not without its cost. It’s no easy task to balance a sense of irrelevance with the longing for glory, the abyss with the applause. Artists run their fingers over the fabric of eternity.

What sort of brainwashing, he had wondered, had created a world in which people worked fifty or sixty hours a week, every week, no matter how beautiful the day outside, no matter what thoughts they were having? Where would the paintings come from? The novels and sculptures? The music?

Even after all this time, the sun never says, ‘You owe me.’ Look what happens with a love like that. It lights the whole world.

Be faithful to that which exists within yourself.

It was easy to gain strength from chaos because it had about it the abyss--always so tantalizing--as the heroin addicts knew. But the journey to the abyss was short-lived. The harder road was to draw strength and not power. To gain footing not in the wild uncertainty of immortality but the abiding knowledge of mortality.

You are not dead. You are simply ahead on the path. When my time comes, I will be ready and you will be there.

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are. E.E. Cummings

Artists run their fingers over the fabric of eternity.

Grief was a threshold thing that lived at the heart of the inevitable.

Marina Abramovic had brought something new into the city. She had made of herself a rock in the center of a town where everything moved and had been moving en masse for hundreds of years.

Art is really a sort of sport. To master the leap is essential. It is the game of the leap. Practice, practice, practice, then leap. The starting point may be different for each, but the goal is the same. Do something worthwhile before you die.

Love was a wasteland. That's the way it went, Danica knew. "You want to be a strong woman? she asked the visitors who wandered by, oblivious to her. "Then you will never find a man who treats you as an equal. You have to play the little games. Oh, giggling, cooking, making them think they have such a huge cock every time they put it near you. The truth is that men are the empty ones. And women are meant to fill them up. I could count on a few fingers the men I ever truly admired. Give them long enough and men are always disappointing.

Coincidence, I've heard, is God's way of being discreet. But convergence is more than that. It is something that, once set in motion, will have an unknown effect. It is a human condition to admire hindsight. I always thought foresight was so much more useful.

If two people were holding on to a rock face and one of them lost faith, wasn’t it up to the other person to tell them everything was going to be alright? Maybe Lydia was on a rock face in the Hamptons. She had told him to climb the rope. Climb, Arky, climb! She wanted him to save himself. And he had. He had climbed up. But she was still down there. Maybe she was waiting for him. Maybe she was waiting for him to come back and haul her up. Or at least be there to say goodbye when she fell. Maybe she’d been holding on all this time, wondering when he’d put his head over the cliff and say, ‘I’m here. I’m back with help.

Only missed being a jumper, or dying in the collapse, by five minutes. That ash on me, later I thought about it. That was people. Probably people I knew.

Was he really meant to give up his own life to care for her every hour of the day? Had he really signed up for that?

He would eat a woman's confidence.

I am only interested in art that can change the ideology of society

I have observed that the opportunities to chew on failure are as myriad as fork designs. In each there is a little death, and the first response to such a death is usually anger.

Every hour of the day an artist falls to earth and we fall beside them. I fell a long time ago with Arky Levin. But I fell before that beside Marina Abramović.

The morning sun is spilling into the penthouse. Rigby, a gray rug of cat, lies sprawled on her back on the sofa with her paws stretched high above her head.

What she didn't know, what she took for granted about living with Karl and being a wife, was far larger than the things she could name.