A few favorite quotes from Dave Hickey's most recent screed in Art in America:

Art criticism that seeks to endow difficult works of art with an element of transparency is regarded with suspicion. Members of the art world, like the adepts of a mystery cult, tread softly, lest some casual explanation shatter the altars at which they worship.

There are three kinds of graduate schools:

There are the "normal" schools that recruit graduate students as teaching assistants to do the faculty's work for them. Students at these schools, one hopes, learn enough about academia to avoid it thereafter.

There are the "feeder" schools in the New York and Los Angeles areas that dwell in the tyrannical shadows of the marketplace. Students from these schools occasionally succeed by fortuitous shortsightedness.

Then there are the "seminaries" where students are indoctrinated into last year's intellectual fashion. These schools take students from every walk of life and rob them of their birthright.