Professor: I'm of the personal opinion that anything counts for art. Take, for example, Nelly's "Hot in Here." We have an admonition of certain weather conditions and an entreaty for certain members of a demographic to react within a certain way, and a compliant voice replies, "I am getting so hot, I'm gonna take my clothes off." This piece of art demonstrates how much easier life would be if getting a woman naked was that easy. And also, it makes me dance, and as we know, hips don't lie.

--NYU Bobst Library
Overheard in New York

"Maria Callas once said, 'When you perform, half of the brain has to be in complete control and the other half of the brain has to be at a complete loss.'"
- From an interview with Marina Abramovic, performance artist

"When you go below ground in New York City, are you going underground or are you going deeper inside a building?"
- Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG

"He's the kind of man a woman would have to marry to get rid of."
Mae West via Tom Waits True Confessions

"You came to me this morning
and you handled me like meat.
You'd have to live alone to know
how good that feels, how sweet.
My mirror twin, my next of kin,
I'd know you in my sleep.
And who but you would take me in
A thousand kisses deep?"
- Leonard Cohen, a draft of the song/poem "A Thousand Kisses Deep"

"In April 1981, at my request, my mother went to a detective agency. She hired them to follow me, to report on my daily activities, and to provide photographic evidence of my existence."
- Sophie Calle, from her photographic series The Shadow

"During the night, the mist on the window had turned to ice. I see that it was still night, six-thirty, seven o’clock; wintertime then, and dark outside; no details, only darkness; the windowpane covered with the patterns of the frozen mist; on the lowest pane, on the left-hand side of the window, at eye level, in the light; this light from an electric bulb, yellow against the intense darkness outside, opaque and wintry, clouded by the mist; not a uniform mist, as when it rains, but an almost transparent frost, forming patterns; a web of translucent patterns, with a certain thickness, the slight thickness of frost, but with variations in this thickness, and, because of these miniscule variations, forming patterns on the glass, like a vegetal network, an entire system of veins, a surface vegetation, a cluster of flat ferns; or a flower."
- from Jacques Roubaud's novel The Loop, found on This Space