It's important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent subtle and sophisticated people with organized societies and great art.

I went to art school actually when I was sixteen years old.

Does art have a future? Performance genres like opera theater music and dance are thriving all over the world but the visual arts have been in slow decline for nearly 40 years. No major figure of profound influence has emerged in painting or sculpture since the waning of Pop Art and the birth of Minimalism in the early 1970s.

In the first book of my Discworld series published more than 26 years ago I introduced Death as a character there was nothing particularly new about this - death has featured in art and literature since medieval times and for centuries we have had a fascination with the Grim Reaper.

With care and skill and cunning art She parried Time's malicious dart And kept the years at bay Till passion entered in her heart and aged her in a day!

Many say an art dealer running a museum is a 'conflict of interest.' But maybe the art world has lived an artificial or unintentional lie all of these years when it comes to conflicts of interest.

It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino's work. From the time I first saw his art in the mid-eighties I almost always dismissed it as mannered Romantic formulaic conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction.

A canon is antithetical to everything the New York art world has been about for the past 40 years during which we went from being the center of the art world to being one of many centers.

It's great that New York has large spaces for art. But the enormous immaculate box has become a dated even oppressive place. Many of these spaces were designed for sprawling installations large paintings and the Relational Aesthetics work of the past fifteen years.

Can space break? I mean the space of art galleries. Over the past 100 years art galleries have gone from looking like Beaux Arts salons to simple storefronts to industrial lofts to the gleaming giant white cubes of Chelsea with their shiny concrete floors.

Artistic qualities that once seemed undeniable don't seem so now. Sometimes these fluctuations are only fickleness of taste momentary glitches in an artist's work or an artist getting ahead of his audience (it took me ten years to catch up to Albert Oehlen). Other times however these problems mean there's something wrong with the art.

It took the Metropolitan Museum of Art nearly 50 years to wake up to Pablo Picasso. It didn't own one of his paintings until 1946 when Gertrude Stein bequeathed that indomitable quasi-Cubistic picture of herself - a portrait of the writer as a sumo Buddha - to the Met principally because she disliked the Museum of Modern Art.

The style of ancient Egyptian art is transcendently clear something 8-year-olds can recognize in an instant. Its consistency and codification is one of the most epic visual journeys in all art one that lasts 30 dynasties spread over 3 000 years.

When science art literature and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible which can make a man's name live for thousands of years.

I've always liked traveling around Europe and seeing the architecture. The buildings in capital cities have been there for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. Some look better than the new ones.

I could be happy doing something like architecture. It would involve another couple of years of graduate school but that's what I studied in college. That's what I always wanted to do.

Charles was very intent to use his years as Prince of Wales to make his mark while he still had freedom of maneuver that he wouldn't have as King. The first subject he really went for was architecture. It made an impact.

I believe very strongly and have fought since many years ago - at least over 30 years ago - to get architecture not just within schools but architecture talked about under history geography science technology art.

Any architectural project we do takes at least four or five years so increasingly there is a discrepancy between the acceleration of culture and the continuing slowness of architecture.

I probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible. Through my 20s and into my 30s I began to become aware of how so much of my art and architecture has a decidedly Eastern character.

For many years I have lived uncomfortably with the belief that most planning and architectural design suffers for lack of real and basic purpose. The ultimate purpose it seems to me must be the improvement of mankind.

It was very hard for all of us. It's still very hard. The anniversary of his death just passed and every single one of his friends still after all these years... it's unbelievable.

I was always very grateful to 'em and am grateful to 'em now. I went back a couple of years ago and did their 20th anniversary show. But the longer I stayed on Hee Haw the worse things got for me musically.

Presently the Commission for Commemorating 350 Years of American Jewish History has been brought about to encourage and sponsor a variety of historical activities that advance our understanding of the American Jewish experience as it marks this milestone anniversary.