Kinkade estimated that one of his paintings hung in every twenty homes in America. Yet the art world unanimously ignores or reviles him. Me included.

Poor Georgia O'Keeffe. Death didn't soften the opinions of the art world toward her paintings.

To me, nothing in the art world is neutral. The idea of 'disinterest' strikes me as boring, dishonest, dubious, and uninteresting.

The art world is molting - some would say melting. Galleries are closing; museums are scaling back.

Damien Hirst is the Elvis of the English art world, its ayatollah, deliverer, and big-thinking entrepreneurial potty-mouthed prophet and front man. Hirst synthesizes punk, Pop Art, Jeff Koons, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, and Catholicism.

The forties, seventies, and the nineties, when money was scarce, were great periods, when the art world retracted but it was also reborn.