I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history that he redefined the idea of beauty that he combined painting sculpture photography and everyday life with such gall and that he was interested in as he put it 'the ability to conceive failure as progress.'

What sculptors do is represent the essence of gesture. What is important in mime is attitude.

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.

The art of mastering life is the prerequisite for all further forms of expression whether they are paintings sculptures tragedies or musical compositions.

Mission accomplished. The Museum of Modern Art's wide-open tall-ceilinged super-reinforced second floor was for all intents and purposes built to accommodate monumental installations and gigantic sculptures should the need arise. It has arisen.

Appropriation is the idea that ate the art world. Go to any Chelsea gallery or international biennial and you'll find it. It's there in paintings of photographs photographs of advertising sculpture with ready-made objects videos using already-existing film.

It is not hard to understand modern art. If it hangs on a wall it's a painting and if you can walk around it it's a sculpture.

Sculpture is the art of the intelligence.

It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work.

A sculptor is a person who is interested in the shape of things a poet in words a musician by sounds.

The sculptor produces the beautiful statue by chipping away such parts of the marble block as are not needed - it is a process of elimination.

At a certain point I just put the building and the art impulse together. I decided that building was a legitimate way to make sculpture.

Urs Fischer specializes in making jaws drop. Cutting giant holes in gallery walls digging a crater in Gavin Brown's gallery floor in 2007 creating amazing hyperrealist wallpaper for a group show at Tony Shafrazi: It all percolates with uncanny destructiveness operatic uncontrollability and barbaric sculptural power.

The best artist has that thought alone Which is contained within the marble shell The sculptor's hand can only break the spell To free the figures slumbering in the stone.