"The twelve gates were twelve pearls, each gate being made from a single pearl" –Book of Revelation 21:21

"Analogy, functioning as a circular mode of thought, makes it possible to tour the whole area of art and luxury without ever leaving it. Thus Château Margaux wine can be described with the same words as are used to describe the château, just as others will evoke Proust apropos of Monet or César Franck which is a good way of talking about neither (...)"
–Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 53.

heterotopias

"....the divans and settees in the final room were placed just so to give visitors a spot to rest and discretely breastfeed a newborn baby, or to sink into a space of lazy, navel-gazing thought - as someone might on the therapist's couch."
- T'ai Smith "West(ern) Waste(land): On Franz West at the Baltimore Art Museum" published in Texte Zur Kunst, June 2009

Nothingness in the air

http://www.ccca.ca/history/isaacs/english/68photos1.html

Chess Game Performance
Marcel Duchamp / John Cage

Ryerson Theatre, March 5, 1968

Avrom Isaacs recounts that, after the chess game "performance" between Marcel Duchamp and John Cage, Duchamp visited his home, and in true Duchampian fashion, "nothing happened."

(See, also, Dennis Reid, "Duchamp in Canada", Canadian Art [Winter 1987]: 52-54).

Yuppie Flu: "a psychological stress condition that paralyzes the performance of talented people and produces long-lasting flu-like symptoms."
–David Harvey The Condition of Postmodernity, 1990

The art dealer says: "I like that Jeremy and Neil come from a kind of urban-downtown-punk-skate-band based kind of culture"

"Note that billion in traditional British usage means a million million, not, as in American usage, a thousand million. Editors working with material by British writers may need to query the use of this term."
–Chicago Manual of Style

Pavlov's Platypus

One of my colleagues told me about the lake outside the GlaxoSmithKline building in Ware, Hertfordshire. The lake is stocked with Koi Carp and spanned by a wooden bridge. For nine months before the building opened, a man was paid to walk over the bridge every day, feeding the fish as he went. Now, when clients of the company arrive, they are obliged to cross the bridge to reach the building entrance. Schools of fish suddenly appear beneath them and follow their every step across the lake.