• Narrow sight means narrow vision.
• The more I think about whether my art is experimental or traditional the less I get done.
• Traditional and experimental: these are as constitutive, shifting, and perceptual as the other great descriptive fictions of our age: race, gender, sexuality and beyond.
• Where is your generosity as a reader, as a writer?
• Don’t swallow stones just because they glitter; don’t eat spoiled meat even if it smells sweet.
• Anything can be turned: the subversive becomes fashionable; the commonplace, cutting-edge.
• What is the structural principle within the work?
• How does (or does not) the work’s structural principle animate substance over surface effect?
• How does—-how will-—the work endure?
• Good work is its own recognition so why worry about who gets awards?
• Complaints, controversies, and concepts are curious: they purport to bring us closer to the work through heightened discussion while simultaneously distancing us from the particularities of the art itself
• If you become enraged or aggrieved when you read a work that does not conform to your ideals to the point where you label, rant, rail, and condemn, then you need to make a trip to Darfur in Sudan or to any number of inner city environments or even to a foreclosed house in the suburbs so you may rediscover your generosity and relocate what is dire in our age.
• If a mosquito could pull a plow then I would surely hook her up.
• I’d rather be an artisan like an unsightly plumber, pants-ill-fitted, kneeling before open pipes, then an artist who is overly concerned with the lie of greatness and the devilry of my work’s reception.
• Favor really is deceit.
• As soon as you feel you are entitled to something as an artist you have already missed the generous point of your practice.
• Your work is no more important anyone else’s.
• Greatness is the worse kind of advertising: good work demands more than a slogan, more than platitudes, more than superlatives, more than favor, more, more, more—it keeps demanding and questioning–refusing hagiography, refusing memorials, refusing labels, refusing in-groups and out-groups, refusing to be done.

Sincerely yours,
Jonathan David Jackson