'… it can be said that the first use of serial imagery in recent painting is shared by two artists, Ad Reinhardt and Yves Klein. Klein's serial painting (begun about 1957) is marked by the systematic use of one canvas size and one grainy textured color. The similarity of color together with the low textural level of organically clustered paint grain, while it slowed down scan, was insufficient to defeat an inherent tendency towards inert uniformity. Reinhardt's use of serial imagery, on the other hand, though also basically entropic as an enterprise, is more important for a number of reasons. Reinhardt's serial usage predates that of Klein, and unlike the overtly systematic look of Albers' art, Reinhardt's serial forms imply the use of a structure whose order is inherent but concealed. In various paintings (as far back as 1955) Reinhardt employed as a structural principle a series of fundamentally positioned forms that repeated at the framing edge. At times he united four square canvases to form a larger square. This modular division of the overall format was further reiterated by the horizontal and vertical squares symmetrically placed within each segment. His early systematic use of symmetry served to purge his painting of an outdated rhetoric, which he campaigned against equally in his systematically reiterated writings.

Reinhardt clearly is a key figure in the evolution of serial imagery in the United States, as Klein was not. If, apart from the inherent entropic tendency of his painting, any deficiency could be isolated it would be his manner of paint application, which never sufficiently deactivated the internal time-flow of the structure. His method of facture, consisting of a layer-upon-layer application of flat paint over a preexistent image, left traces of a "local" time track. In his last works, however, the black overlay of paint fused more into a one-to-one relationship with his structure. As the paintings got blacker they became more and more neutral. The formal importance of Reinhardt's painting therefore resides in its quality of indetermination, its neutral emptiness. This indeterminate quality would not be remarkable in itself if it were not allied to an emphasis on symmetry and macro-structure: that which raises no claim to stand for the work in its own right, but which controls the development of the individual paintings within a series. What Reinhardt set into motion was the idea of a network of choices and limitations which were pre-formed but not logically apparent on the surface of the picture or within the whole series. Until now it has always been assumed that Reinhardt was only repeating one painting rather than painting a series. On the other hand Reinhardt's work also proved that once the hierarchical links are solved and ironed out it becomes increasingly difficult to achieve contrast, that is, to give each painting a positive identity without reasserting rank or becoming overbearingly redundant. Nevertheless, his painting was a forceful step in the serial direction and of great importance to a later generation.'

'Three basic operating assumptions separate serially ordered works from multiple variants:

1. The derivation of the terms or interior divisions of the work is by means of a numerical or otherwise systematically predetermined process (permutation, progression, rotation, reversal).

2. The order takes precedence over the execution.

3. The completed work is fundamentally parsimonious and systematically self exhausting.'

'Rejecting the determinist notion of natural necessity as unknowable, and also rejecting Epicurean randomness, Kant selects necessity that we create, on the model of law or legislation.'

'We play what the day recommends.'

(Disappointment as a response to a losing confrontation between imagination and the actual.)

'This distinction did away with the idea that one could use common sense to answer everything coherently.'

'… one suspects a race between authorities to see who could prosecute the man whose 1999 single introduced the phrase "bling bling" both to the public and to Merriam-Webster's dictionary.'

'Whether this contemplative attitude had its origin in my contemplative function as a guardian of culture within society, as a Marxist would state without further ado; or whether it represents a primary object of my existence (and one does find it in pride, freedom, the destabilization of oneself, the contemplative stoicism and the optimism which certainly form part of my primary project)—that's what I do not wish to decide here. It's certain, in any case, that this way of taking refuge at the top of the tower when its base is under attack, and of looking down from above without blenching, albeit with eyes somewhat widened by fear, is the attitude I chose in '38-'39 faced with the threats of war. It's also the one which, a little earlier, inspired my article on the transcendence of the Ego—where I quite simply eject the Self from consciousness, like some nosy visitor. With myself, I didn't have that tender intimacy which causes there to be adhesions (as in medical parlance) between the Self and consciousness—so that if one tried to remove the former, one would be afraid of tearing the latter. It was perfectly all right outside, on the contrary. It remained there, granted; but I watched it through the pane with all the calm and severity in the world.

I long believed, moreover, that the existence of a character couldn't be reconciled with the freedom of consciousness: I thought character was nothing but a bunch of maxims, more moral than psychological, in which our neighbour sums up his experience of us. Consciousness-as-refuge remained, as was propoer, colourless, odourless and tasteless. It was only this year, with the advent of war, that I understood the truth: character assuredly must not be confused with all those recipe-maxims of the moralists—'he's quick-tempered; he's lazy; etc.'—but is the primary, free project of our being in the world. I tried to show this for William II.

'I thought I knew something about narrative, but I didn't.'