America gave the world the notion of the melting pot - an alchemical cooking device wherein diverse ethnic and religious groups voluntarily mix together, producing a new, American identity. And while critics may argue that the melting pot is a national myth, it has tenaciously informed the America's collective imagination.

To me, all creativity is magic. Ideas start out in the empty void of your head - and they end up as a material thing, like a book you can hold in your hand. That is the magical process. It's an alchemical thing. Yes, we do get the gold out of it but that's not the most important thing. It's the work itself.

Advice," Do?a Vorchenza chuckled. "Advice. The years play a sort of alchemical trick, transmuting one's mutterings to a state of respectability. Give advice at forty and you're a nag. Give it at seventy and you're a sage.

When the rose and the cross are united the alchemical marriage is complete and the drama ends. Then we wake from history and enter eternity.

Our culture now wonderfully alchemically transforms images and history into artistic material. The possibilities seem endless and wide open.

The alchemy of good curating amounts to this: Sometimes placing one work of art near another makes one plus one equal three. Two artworks arranged alchemically leave each intact transform both and create a third thing.

The price of a work of art has nothing to do with what the work of art is can do or is worth on an existential alchemical level.