1. What is Modern Art? Matthew Collings, Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

2. By Duchamp and Piero Manzoni, respectively.

3. 20th Century Photography, Marc Scheps, Taschen, 1996.

4. Art n. 1. Skill, esp. human skill as opposed to nature; ability in skilful execution as an object in itself; cunning; imitative or imaginative skill applied to design, as in paintings, architecture etc; pertaining to use of such skill (art music; art needlework). Concise Oxford Dictionary. 2. Professionals in the modern art world appear to have a surprising reluctance to distinguish between the two words A-R-T and S-T-U-N-T.

5. Quote by Franz Liszt taken from The Virtuoso Years, Alan Walker, Faber & Faber,1989.

6. Some interesting comments about the skill of Bach and Leonardo: Not the least asset in Bach's musical setting of his texts was his contrapuntal ingenuity. This statement may seem surprising. We are accustomed to considering the consistent application of technical devices in music as an impediment to the free flow of imagination. But there is, as Goethe remarked, 'no form without content'. Bach was the last of the great line of composers who achieved beauty and depth not in spite of the contrapuntal devices he used but through them. The Bach Reader, Hans David and Arthur Mendel, W.W. Norton & Co, New York & London, 1972, pp34-35.

7. "To his contemporaries, art, arte, meant skill, much as we still use the concept in 'the art of war' or 'the art of love', while science, scientia, meant knowledge. Leonardo emphasised again and again in his writings that the art of painting had to rest on knowledge. Far from being a mere craft, painting should be classified with the so-called Liberal Arts, the disciplines based on knowledge". E.H. Gombrich, Preface to Leonardo Da Vinci (exhibition catalogue) South Bank Centre, London, 1989, p1.

6. 'She has always worked at more than one remove from the characteristic avant-garde movements of her lifetime: Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimal and Conceptual art. Instead of a formally bound or conceptually coherent progression, her work has shown a progressive exploration of materials and techniques which has created for her an ever expanding field of practical options'. Louise Bourgeois, Frances Morris, Tate Gallery Publishing 2000. Exactly the same could of course be said of a lot of textile artists.

7. See Art Textiles of the World: Australia, ed. M. Koumis, Telos Art Publishing, 1999, p18.

8. If only it were not obligatory for textile shows to have titles such as Scrumptious Stitchery. (Painted Paint by Picasso, a new exhibition of work executed with a half-inch sable brush. Workshops. Bring your own brush.)

9. In fact our very first candle is being lit in October 2001, where the exhibition, Art Textiles of the World: The Netherlands (accompanied by the launch of our book of the same name edited by Dery Timmer) will take place at the Museum Rijswijk, in collaboration with Textiel Plus, and curated by Arjan Kwakernaak with Dery Timmer. (see museumryswyk.nl for further information).

10. By Rafi Zabor, published by Vintage.