“One thing I say in my sometime talk with regular folks who say they hate some art is that that’s good, it’s an authentic response. But maybe linger a little. Have another response. You might hate it even more, but you’ll have learned something about yourself. Resisting a new experience is really a sign of physiological health: we are whole from moment to moment and then we encounter something contradictory, and the proper first instinct is to feel threatened and to fight it.”

“Today’s art craze is baked into the global economy – not a local cyclone but a climate change caused by belching emissions of excess money that won’t stop while the carbon of present mega-wealth holds out. That is, art prices can crash only as one piddling consequence of a planetary catastrophe. … Sensing that people will one day look back on this era as a freakish episode in cultural history, why not get a head start on viewing it that way? Detach and marvel.”

Les Femmes d’Alger (Version “O”) was born out of a rivalry between Picasso and Henri Matisse. But competition can evolve into adoration, and when Matisse died on November 3, 1954, Picasso embarked upon an ambitious form of mourning: He would make a series of 15 works in homage to Eugène Delacroix’s 1834 painting Les Femmes d’Alger, a work held in near-religious regard by the late artist.