Now, it's not my intention to denigrate corporate investment in the arts, artists marketing themselves on Web pages, the political debate on federal arts funding, the need for community-outreach programs, or art's potential for solving complex social problems. Nor am I objecting to children learning the value of making rhymes or doodles. What I am objecting to is our failure to discriminate between exposure and cultivation. Our receptivity to the potential magnitude of the art experience has become increasingly dulled. You can't create unless you're willing to subordinate creative impulse to the construction of form.
Art is rare and sacred and hard work, and there ought to be a wall of fire around it.
Like a grim and self-righteously determined docent at the Whitney Museum, many of us are tempted to turn the trivial into the significant. We trivialize the whole question of what makes something art when we refuse to accept the very real difference between art and Art. It's time to ditch Duchamp's challenge of the urinal, time to end the pretense that anything can be art. Creating it, analyzing and understanding it, judging it are extremely demanding, though immeasurably rewarding, experiences. Making the arts effortlessly accessible or good for business does nothing but cheapen them in the long run.