The Apology opened the opportunity for a new relationship based on mutual respect and mutual responsibility between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia. Because without mutual respect and mutual responsibility, the truth is we can achieve very little.

Ladies and gentlemen, it is with great sadness that I announce that I will resign as Australia's Minister for Foreign Affairs. I am sad because I love this job. I'm totally dedicated to the work that we are doing in Australia's name around the world, and I believe that we have achieved many good results for Australia, and I'm proud of them.

I deeply believe that if the Australian Labor Party, a party of which I have been a proud member for more than 30 years, is to have the best future for our nation, then it must change fundamentally its culture and to end the power of faceless men. Australia must be governed by the people, not by the factions.

Australia is a nation of compassion. Courage and compassion. And the third of these great values: resilience.

As nations we should also commit afresh to righting past wrongs. In Australia we began this recently with the first Australians - the oldest continuing culture in human history. On behalf of the Australian Parliament, this year I offered an apology to indigenous Australians for the wrongs they had suffered in the past.

A continuing narrative throughout Australia's history that says it is better to build up than to tear down - this is the continuing mission of Labor.

Well Australia's been in Afghanistan from the get go, way back in 2001, but we have been resolute throughout and with support from both sides of Australian politics.

There is a reason why the cultures of Indigenous Australia inspire such fascination. And that is that they represent a unique way of thinking about the world. A vision that over tens of thousands of years has risen out of the land, the power, the very being of our continent, Australia.

By 2050, the Australian population is expected to grow from 22 million to 36 million. That increase alone will put huge pressure on our towns and our cities. We will need more homes, more roads, more rail lines, more hospitals, more schools, just to accommodate so many Australians.

Something my mum taught me years and years and years ago, is life's just too short to carry around a great bucket-load of anger and resentment and bitterness and hatreds and all that sort of stuff.

As in nature, as in art, so in grace; it is rough treatment that gives souls, as well as stones, their luster.

'Untitled' is a time machine that can transport you to 1992, an edgy moment when the art world was crumbling, money was scarce, and artists like Tiravanija were in the nascent stages of combining Happenings, performance art, John Cage, Joseph Beuys, and the do-it-yourself ethos of punk. Meanwhile, a new art world was coming into being.

Summer is a great time to visit art museums, which offer the refreshing rinse of swimming pools - only instead of cool water, you immerse yourself in art.

Venice is the perfect place for a phase of art to die. No other city on earth embraces entropy quite like this magical floating mall.

I love art dealers. In some ways, they're my favorite people in the art world. Really. I love that they put their money where their taste is, create their own aesthetic universes, support artists, employ people, and do all of this while letting us see art for free. Many are visionaries.

The style of ancient Egyptian art is transcendently clear, something 8-year-olds can recognize in an instant. Its consistency and codification is one of the most epic visual journeys in all art, one that lasts 30 dynasties spread over 3,000 years.

Artschwager's art always involves looking closely at surfaces, questions what an object is, wants to make you forget the name of the thing you're looking at so that it might mushroom in your mind into something that triggers unexpected infinities.

It's art that pushes against psychological and social expectations, that tries to transform decay into something generative, that is replicative in a baroque way, that isn't about progress, and wants to - as Walt Whitman put it - 'contain multitudes.'

'Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era,' the Whitney Museum's 40th-anniversary trip down counterculture memory lane, provides moments of buzzy fun, but it'll leave you only comfortably numb. For starters, it may be the whitest, straightest, most conservative show seen in a New York museum since psychedelia was new.

I love Rauschenberg. I love that he created a turning point in visual history, that he redefined the idea of beauty, that he combined painting, sculpture, photography, and everyday life with such gall, and that he was interested in, as he put it, 'the ability to conceive failure as progress.'

It took me twenty years to get Steven Parrino's work. From the time I first saw his art, in the mid-eighties, I almost always dismissed it as mannered, Romantic, formulaic, conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction.

A sad fact of life lately at the Museum of Modern Art is that when it comes to group shows of contemporary painting from the collection, the bar has been set pretty low.

John Currin's exaggerated realism and his twisted women kept me off balance, never knowing if they were sincere or ironic or some new emotion.

Urs Fischer specializes in making jaws drop. Cutting giant holes in gallery walls, digging a crater in Gavin Brown's gallery floor in 2007, creating amazing hyperrealist wallpaper for a group show at Tony Shafrazi: It all percolates with uncanny destructiveness, operatic uncontrollability, and barbaric sculptural power.

There's one Baldessari work I genuinely love and would like to own, maybe because of my Midwestern roots and love of driving alone. 'The backs of all the trucks passed while driving from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara, California, Sunday, 20 January 1963' consists of a grid of 32 small color photographs depicting just what the title says.

When the purse strings tighten up at museums, the institutions usually cut back and cancel shows. That's exactly the wrong reaction. In fact, now is a good time for them to loosen up - a chance to breathe and experiment a little - and go for the juicy solution lurking in their own basements.

New Yorkers only cross water for visual culture if the water is an ocean. The East River throws us for a huge loop. If we started going to Queens and the Bronx for visual culture, many of our rent, space, and crowding problems would be over indefinitely.

Abstraction is one of the greatest visionary tools ever invented by human beings to imagine, decipher, and depict the world.

My goal is to make fine art, and fine art comes from the soul. If you have virtuosity and facility, you can take and create something of significance.

Works of art make rules; rules do not make works of art.

Art is the most beautiful of all lies.

Extreme complication is contrary to art.

Beauty must appeal to the senses, must provide us with immediate enjoyment, must impress us or insinuate itself into us without any effort on our part.

Art is the most beautiful deception of all. And although people try to incorporate the everyday events of life in it, we must hope that it will remain a deception lest it become a utilitarian thing, sad as a factory.

Music is the arithmetic of sounds as optics is the geometry of light.

Music is the silence between the notes.

Music is the expression of the movement of the waters, the play of curves described by changing breezes.

The century of airplanes has a right to its own music.

I love music passionately. And because I love it I try to free it from barren traditions that stifle it.

There is nothing is more musical than a sunset. He who feels what he sees will find no more beautiful example of development in all that book which, alas, musicians read but too little - the book of Nature.

The attraction of the virtuoso for the public is very like that of the circus for the crowd. There is always the hope that something dangerous will happen.

I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them.

In an artwork you're always looking for artistic decisions, so an ashtray is perfect. An ashtray has got life and death.

Great art - or good art - is when you look at it, experience it and it stays in your mind. I don't think conceptual art and traditional art are all that different.

People don't like contemporary art, but all art starts life as contemporary - I can't really see a difference.

Making art, good art, is always a struggle. It can make you happy when you pull it off. There's no better feeling. It's beauteous. But it's always about hard work and inspiration and sweat and good ideas.

I have always been aware that you have to get people listening before you can change their minds. Any artist's big fear is being ignored, so if you get debate, that's great.

I was taught to confront things you can't avoid. Death is one of those things. To live in a society where you're trying not to look at it is stupid because looking at death throws us back into life with more vigour and energy. The fact that flowers don't last for ever makes them beautiful.

But I think it's more that when you're young, you're invincible, you're immortal - or at least you think you are. The possibilities are limitless, you're inventing the future. Then you get older and suddenly you have a history. It's fixed. You can't change anything. I find that a bit disturbing, to be honest.

It's amazing what you can do with an E in A-Level art, a twisted imagination and a chainsaw.