March 2009 Archives

I have here a small pile of things I've been meaning to write about, including a bunch of good stuff I saw at the Bridge Art Fair. Somehow I've been putting off getting to all of it, though, so in the interests of moving myself along, I've decided to write up just a short review of two shows I saw which I didn't like. That way I can get right to the things I did like. (Skip the negativity if you want by scrolling down to Julie Evans.)

First up, Juliana Romano at Marvelli Gallery (until April 4, 2009): Feeblist junk. One accidentally decent painting (pictured here); the rest I wouldn't hang in my doghouse, if I had a doghouse, which I don't.

Next, Wei Dong at Nicholas Robinson (until April 4, 2009): Very definitely PAINTINGS. They're skillfully executed in a strong academic style with just the right amount of idiosyncrasies. Wei Dong exhibits all the superficial skills to denote Art, to tell anyone looking at his paintings that these are certainly Art. And the subject matter is just weird and baffling enough to qualify as Contemporary Art -- no stuffy still lifes or pious saints for us! No, we need meaty rotting Chinese mermaids with disturbingly over-rendered sex organs. In short, this show is slick, soulless, and not worth anyone's time.

And now the good stuff: Julie Evans at Julie Saul Gallery (until April 11, 2009). As always I have to encourage you to go see the works in person, because the JPEGs don't even hint at the subtleties of these paintings. In particular Julie uses a glittery, faceted black that doesn't come through at all; it lends the deepest darks of this series the wonderful quality of gemstones on velvet.

What Julie has managed here is nothing short of wonderful. She perfectly balances abstract, loose, random acts of watercolor, subject to the lovely whims of paint bleeding across wet paper, with very precise strokes and dots of gouache and pencil arranged in careful geometric patterns. The result is a series of paintings of enchanting beauty which appear to be unfolding before your eyes as you observe them. Julie's use of color is extraordinary, too, with bright yellows against crisp whites, olive greens butting up next to blacks, pinks and purples dancing throughout. If all of that weren't enough, she has the sense to keep her compositions hanging in negative space, exquisitely aware of the emptiness around them.

It's clear that Julie has been absorbing and borrowing from Indian textile patterns; she owes a debt to her sources, especially for her colors. In places she even quotes directly, using traditional lotus forms among others. But she comes by this influence honestly; according to the gallery staff and her own biography, she's spent time living in India.

I loved her work so much that when I saw another one of her paintings, an earlier, brighter one, hanging behind the gallery desk, I asked if I could go behind to get a better look at it. That prompted Phil Whitman (listed on the gallery site as a Preparator) to take me over to the gallery drawers so he could pull out another show's worth of her earlier paintings, most of which were watercolors on paper glued onto wood panels. You can see much of what I saw at Julie's site but, again, you can't catch the full beauty of her work. Thank you, Phil!

It's clear from seeing her past paintings that Julie's progressing, evolving, and gaining confidence; her most recent work, in the show proper, is clearly built on her earlier work, and better, too, although less expansive in color and in filling her ground. In a way you can watch over the years as she steadies herself, stabilizes what she wants to do, and then begins to pare down, distill, and concentrate the essence of what she's doing. Her earlier work is less assured but more controlled; she's broken free of obsessively constraining her paint and the results are fantastic.

You have about ten days. Get to it.

The other night I had a wet dream.

This isn't all that odd but it's been happening to me more since I've become undepressed. This most recent emission started me thinking, though: If my nervous system can cause me to have an orgasm without any of the appropriate external stimulation at all, it follows that my nervous system contains within itself everything needed for me to orgasm. Therefore all the seemingly appropriate external stimulation is unnecessary.

Generalizing from this I conclude that my nervous system contains within itself everything I need to be happy. (This is a particularly bitter pill given that for the past few years my nervous system has decided to withhold that from me and instead let me be depressed all the time.)

Stendhal wrote, in a quote I have taped to my easel, "Beauty is the promise of happiness." Or, in terms of Darwinian survival, beauty is an outward sign of reproductive fitness. Or anyway my apprehension of someone's physical beauty is my nervous system's measure of that someone's reproductive fitness. I think they'd make me happy. I think they'd make a good mate. I would like them to make me orgasm.

But that orgasm isn't in them, it's in me. My happiness isn't intrinsic to that person, it's inside my nervous system. So what does that make them? Some kind of complex key to unlock the happiness inside me?

Beauty may be the promise of happiness, but it's an empty promise. Reproductive fitness does nothing for the individual's happiness. Having children who can go on to reproduce themselves doesn't help me have a happier life in general, or anyway it doesn't need to; once I've had those kids and raised them to a certain point, I can be unhappy. I can even die. And it won't matter a bit to their survival or the survival of my genetic material or the species in general. Darwinian survival isn't an individual matter.

So what's the point of beauty?

I wrote once, not too long ago, that maybe it's time art became about the creation of beautiful objects. Now I'm thinking about changing my mind. I think I'd rather not have my art promise happiness; I'd rather my art unlock the potential for happiness inside you.

I don't know if art can do that. I don't know if I can make art that does that. But it's something to aim for.

I'm behind on some reviews -- I haven't written about the Bridge Fair yet, and I have a few other things here I haven't gotten to, some of which I really liked -- but in the interests of getting this down while it's still fresh, I'm going to skip ahead and write about the most recent opening I went to.

Of course that only opens up more problems. How do you review someone like Joanne Mattera, when she invites you to the opening, has always been nice to you, and greets you with a kiss on the cheek, even if you already wrote a somewhat less than kind review of her curating abilities? It's tough. I'm feeling like I might be thinking more positively to make up for the last couple of reviews I've written. I don't know. It's so hard to be really honest and open. A friend recently wrote to me saying, "People will not love you for your honest opinion, especially if you are not Holland Cotter. And what is an honest opinion anyway? Most people have a hidden agenda. Honest opinions are always mitigated by intention. We have our personal agenda, be it political, economic, or whatever."

I sincerely don't think I have a hidden agenda. I'm just doing for others what I'd like done for me.

Anyway, maundering aside, it helps when you really do like a show, and I really do like GeoMetrics II, at gallery onetwentyeight until April 19, 2009. Don't let the title of the show turn you off; I know, it sounds kind of lame, like some junior high school math textbook from 1977. Frankly the title is the worst thing about the show, which, in the scheme of things, is really good, because it's the least important thing about any art show.

There are some really excellent paintings in this show, which is loosely based, as you might have guessed, around the theme of geometric abstraction. The curator, Gloria Klein, is a longtime hard-edge abstractionist herself, and she has one of her own paintings up, which I didn't even realize at the opening. Somehow I failed to put together the name on the wall next to the work and the person Joanne introduced me to.

Gloria's work immediately reminded me strongly of Tim Mutzel's, which is kind of backwards, since she's been painting for around forty years, and Tim's a child in comparison. Gloria's work is a colorful multifaceted shattering of the picture plane, resolutely flat and yet suggesting multiple depths, like a kaleidoscope. She's a fan of red -- this particular canvas is red all the way around the stretchers -- and blue comes across strongly too; although when you really look at it you can see just as much green and yellow bouncing around. Gloria paints all over, like the Abstract Expressionists and Color Field painters the hard-edge style descended from, and her painting shares that expansiveness you find in their works, that space-filling you can feel in your ears, as it were.

Joanne's two paintings are next to each other near the front of the gallery. I was surprised by them, because I'd seen the JPEGs, and these don't reproduce properly at all. At a smaller size, it looks like maybe she's strung string across a canvas; somewhat larger and it looks like image compression has caused color fringe artifacts across the surface. But no, not at all: In each of these, what Joanne has done is lay down encaustic in layers, over and over, and then gone back in with a carving tool and scraped out lines. So each line reveals, through the layers, a varying sampling of the colors she's laid down. The carving is, of course, imprecise and in places stuttering and halting, so you can see the effort and manual nature of the carving, which both brings out and is brought out by the different colors. The effect is far too subtle, in terms of resolution, to look correct in reproduction. In fact these paintings are closer to sculptures; what you also can't get until you see them in person is the very tactile nature of the encaustic, the way its waxy sheen communicates, with the carving, how it feels, like candle drippings or crayons; with Joanne allowing the encaustic to lap over the edges of her panels like the rind on good cheese. Elegant, simple, precise in their imprecision -- very wabi sabi, as the Japanese might say.

Not far from Joanne's encaustics is one of Steven Alexander's encaustic-like acrylics. I wrote about his work before and his work here didn't change my mind; he still manages to take something potentially cold, a very uniform kind of abstraction, and make it good and heartfelt, basically by messing it up. His distressed canvases are the result, I learned from talking to Steven, of a lot of layering and not, as I jokingly suggested, from leaving Stephen Westfall out in the rain for six months. I also learned that I guessed rightly about how he gets that encaustic-like surface: He mixes his own paints from raw pigments and an acrylic base, which is naturally matte and milky. By varying the concentration of pigment -- mainly by using less than you'd find in a commercially prepared acrylic paint -- he keeps that encaustic-like surface. His control of his medium and his layering result in paintings that look battered but are essentially bulletproof; Steven confided in me that he ships his work to galleries rolled up and lets them re-stretch the canvases when they get them. This is in contrast to encaustic, which is comparatively delicate. Joanne said she always has to watch for people poking her work with a fingernail to see if it is, in fact, wax.

Just along from Steven's work is some more actual encaustic, two paintings by Lynda Ray. (I'm showing the installation view of the paintings here because the colors are closer, to my eye, than the images Lynda has on her own site.) Her work is what you expect from the medium, with its thick oozy and puddled colors looking less brushed and more poured. Lynda's abstraction, like Steven's, tends towards the handmade. Her hard edges aren't that hard at all; instead they waver into each other, lap over in spots, and even drip and sag a little. Steven's paintings look weathered; Lynda's look handmade, homely, like a needlepoint sampler. In a way -- and I don't mean this as an insult -- they're like hard-edge for the home, like cozy Frank Stella. Human-scale abstraction, without the cold intellectual distance so common in the style.

Moving around to the back from there we find Lorien Suarez's contribution. (Interesting note: Lorien has this painting on her site long side up; in the show, it was hung short side up. Further, the image on the show's site is kind of duller than the real thing; but the image I put here, taken from the artist's site, is, to my eye, significantly brighter and peppier than the real one. I'm not sure, then, what orientation is correct -- or even if there is a correct orientation -- and I'm not sure which image is the best to illustrate the work.) This was the painting I was most looking forward to after seeing the show online; I have to admit to being disappointed in it in person. It's good, but I really wanted it to be better. I think the basic trouble with it is, well, it's acrylic. If it were in oil I think that alone would improve it. Instead it comes off as kind of flat, lacking presence; and the blending is not quite right, which could be a problem with the medium (I've had my troubles with getting acrylics to blend properly). Also, the colors are so basic, so clearly straight from the tube. I feel the whole thing needs some modulation. Judging by Lorien's site, this whole series is a lot more interesting than this representative; maybe any of the other ones would've been better. It's hard to say.

Facing each other across the space in front of Lynda's painting are two works by Larry Spaid and one by Laura Battle. For some reason none of them are on the show's site; it may be a coincidence, but neither did any of these low-key works make much of an impression on me. They all seemed competent, quiet, sort of suitable for tasteful corporate decorating. I do remember that Larry's works were framed behind glass and this made the already subtle works difficult to see well.

Next I want to award the Best in Show ribbon to Bruce Pollock for his vibrant painting Red Square Cluster. Maybe it's just a demonstration of Audrey Flack's dictum -- "If you can't make it big, make it red" -- or maybe I just tend to like that red-to-yellow spread, but this painting really caught my eye and held it. Initially it reminded me of the old Koch curve fractal, only of course using circles within circles. On closer inspection the resemblance breaks down, however: The painting is too hand-made for a fractal, too irregular. The circles aren't all precise, and there's evidence still of the lines Bruce used to lay out the composition. The JPEG here smooths out the edges and also compresses the color range too much; the original is sharper and more energetic, with a visual vibration coming off the surface from the imperfect glazing of paint.

The Koch curve comparison continues with the next work by Michael Knutson. His isn't fractal at all but it does use the hoary old Star of David motif, which tiles nicely with hexagons. The trouble with this painting is two-fold: First the color scheme is far too basic; combined with the regularity of the pattern, which although warped is basically the same across the entire canvas, the whole painting just kind of slaps you once and then hangs limply, too busy and yet too staid all at the same time. And second the texture of the oil paint clashes with the style: A pattern as dense as this one really needs to be painted as flatly as possible to avoid the brushwork from heading off in directions at odds with the pattern itself. The result of the wobbly paint application is that the already-overwrought pattern loses whatever coherence it might have held across the picture plane, and the whole composition collapses into a nervous wiggly noise of contrasting primaries. It kind of hurts your eyeballs without giving anything back.

Following along we reach Mark Dagley's work, which is something of an opposite to Michael's painting, being amazingly unbusy, to say nothing of nearly lazy. This work completely failed to catch my eye or interest me in any way. All I saw was muddy, and further inspection didn't improve on that, so I moved on.

Curiously, at first glance Julie Gross' painting made me think of Mondrian. I say this is curious because she doesn't have a straight line in her work while Mondrian, of course, has nothing but straight lines in his best-known work. I should be thinking of him when looking at Julie Karabenick's paintings -- about which more in a bit -- but not Julie Gross'. And yet it seems to me she's doing for circles sort of what he did for rectangles, letting them flow into and out of each other while arranging them in space. Her colors are nothing like Piet's, either, but I can't shake the feeling that she's approaching her work similarly. I do sort of wish her colors here were a little bolder; judging by this work and her Website she's going for a subdued kind of early 1970s palette, with smoky blues and avocado greens and muted earth tones. I'd like to see her come to a middle ground along with Lorien. Still, this painting certainly is a good one, with a solid composition and a positive feeling of flow. Finally, back by the door, we find Julie Karabenick. I also wrote about her work before, and again I don't have much to add. She still has that Atari 2600 thing going, both in terms of color and the low-resolution pixel feeling of her lines; that's not intended as an insult or to take away from the work at all, but just shows my personal associations. I still feel I'd like some more texture in her work -- texture that works with her designs, not to distract from them. Again I'll use the word jazzy: her paintings are jazzy.

Overall I liked this show a good deal. It's one of the few shows I've been to where I'd even like to compliment the hanging; the flow of the show from one work to the next enhances the experience. I think Joanne even brought that to my attention but she didn't need to. I felt it as soon as I walked in. It's definitely worth a trip over to the Lower East Side. In fact it's easier to get to since it's closer to a subway stop than anywhere in Chelsea. Back when we were hanging the Blogger Show, James Kalm suggested that the Lower East Side (some people have taken to typing that LES but I'm resisting) is the next up-and-coming art neighborhood, and maybe he's right.

I'd like to invite anyone reading this to go to my new forum, Stacking Blocks: A Conversation About Art and join in. I've made signing up as easy as possible and I'd love to see you there to discuss the kinds of things unsuitable for a more one-way discussion like this blog.

Of course NYC Art isn't going anywhere. I've got three or four new reviews in process and they should start showing up soon.

Meanwhile, next door to blogpix in Denise Bibro proper, you can find Lisa Dinhofer's In the Round (March 5 through 28, 2009). If the painting I've put up here looks familiar to you, then maybe you've been through the Times Square subway station at some point since 2003; Lisa's got a 90-foot mosaic there, and I'm pretty sure at least one smaller one I've walked past between the bus terminal and the 7 train. I'll always have a soft spot for subway art -- except for the horrid Tom Otterness, whose work should be melted into ingots and dropped in the Marianas Trench -- so maybe I'm biased, but I enjoyed this show.

The show is titled "In the Round" because all the paintings are round -- get it? Get it? In lesser hands this might look simply gimmicky, but in Lisa's -- okay, it's a bit gimmicky anyhow. I'm not sure why she chooses round panels over the typical rectangle but I guess it's okay. Certainly when she's concentrating on spheres or marbles or planets or whatever they are the round panels make some sense, and she clearly likes the swirling vortex motif -- or is it the exploding singularity? Hard to say. Most of her paintings (and the couple of drawings in the show, too) remind me of looking down into those coin funnel displays in the science museum, you know where you donate your loose change for the fun of watching it roll elegantly around and around and down and down until it drops into the hole at the bottom and into some charity's bank account with a plunk.

Only in Lisa's world it's not pennies making the trip, it's marbles, butterflies, dragonflies, and other winged beasties. And the funnel isn't just curved plastic, it's the glowing fabric of the universe, or a bursting supernova, or a black hole, or maybe a rolled-up chess board from Alice's Wonderland.

And, yeah, it's a bit gimmicky. There's a feeling that Lisa's hit upon a successful formula and she's repeating it with slight variations. But you could say the same about Chopin; in fact it's not a bad comparison. Like Frédéric's little pieces, Lisa's paintings are charming, disarming, harmless diversions -- not deep, not earthshattering, not overly exciting, but well-designed clockwork entertainments.

There are a couple of drawings on display where Lisa works in colored pencil on black paper; these reminded me so much of drawings my father did for me when I was a kid -- in particular a drawing of the Enterprise from Star Trek amidst planets of his own invention -- it almost made me tear up. So maybe I'm biased that way, too.

I missed the blogpix (March 5 through March 28, 2009) opening but managed to make it to Denise Bibro the very next day so I could be greeted by Olympia Lambert saying, "You're twelve hours late or twenty-four hours early!" It seems I not only missed the opening, I also was going to miss the Blogger Panel Discussion the next day. Such a shame, too, because really there's nothing more fun than a panel discussion, especially involving people whose job description involves zero contact with other humans. Oly mentioned that, among others, Bill Gusky was going to be there, and I'll admit missing Bill is a shame, because he's a funny, interesting, all-around good guy. I mean, I don't know him that well, for all I know he kicks puppies and drowns kittens for fun, but he's a good guy to hang out with for a few minutes and his Facebook posts are entertaining. And, really, what else matters?

Oly then happily took me through blogpix. I could discuss the work openly with her because she's not the curator for the show; Oly is more of the meta-curator for the show. As she explained, she chose the art bloggers who'd be the curators, and she gave them a mission statement: Choose artists who don't have gallery representation, or don't have much presence in Chelsea, anyway, or who you feel are underappreciated or overlooked in some way. Oly chose Roberta Fallon & Libby Rosof, the pair behind Artblog; veritable force of nature Joanne Mattera; and Hrag Vartanian, who I honestly had never heard of. (I should mention at this point that I've shown work with Roberta & Libby and Joanne, met them, and talked with them. Hrag -- no idea who he is.)

Entering the space Denise calls Platform -- a somewhat separate room from her main gallery -- we were immediately met by an ugly hanging critter by Fallon & Rosof's entry Christopher Davison. Its provocative, evocative title is Black and White Sculpture and it is unpleasant and dopey, a half-houndstooth half poorly sewed figure hanging from the ceiling like a morose monkey. I made immediate noises of distaste and Oly chided me saying, "We love our sad little monkey" or something to that effect. It is hideous and badly made. It is not deserving of her love.

Neither are the other Davison works in the show, all of which are not so much disturbing as they make me worry about the artist. He looks like he could use a little therapy, maybe a nice pet. Certainly not any more time with his pencils and gouache, through which he clearly wishes to infect us with unhappiness. His flat, unmercifully unskilled drawings are unrelieved by any bright spots of skill or compositional interest.

Almost directly across from those, though, are a couple of good-sized jazzy paintings by one of Joanne's picks, Julie Karabenick. Julie's working in a variation on Mondrian, expanding his strict vocabulary to include criss-crossing squares and angular loops, while also extending his palette beyond the primaries and secondaries. Julie's work is certainly energetic and Oly and I batted around some ideas of what they reminded us of before concluding that she was channeling a kind of Atari 2600 aesthetic. Her colors definitely come right off of early game cartridges and the big blocky pixels feel just like Adventure. I'd like her work better, I think, if it had more texture -- Mondrian's paintings are never wholly flat, but Julie's taped hers obsessively and painted so smoothly between the edges that the faintest extra thickness where the paint laps up against the tape shows up in sharp relief.

From there it's easy to turn right and see the rough-hewn paintings of Steven Alexander. Oly said she thought at first they were encaustic, and indeed they have that dull waxy sheen you get from that medium, that feeling that you're seeing the pigments through some translucent glaze. But they're acrylics. I suggested that maybe Steven mixes his own acrylic paint using gel medium and raw pigments; he could use less pigment to get that encaustic-like texture. His surface is roughly prepared and very uneven; the result is to take what might be unexciting hard-edged abstraction and give it an earthy, flawed quality, like Stephen Westfall's work left out in the rain for a few months. Which would honestly improve it.

Next to Steven we found Ben La Rocco, Hrag's entrant in the show. I found Ben's work simply too crude. The paintings feel like studies of studies, like someone barely even made an effort at applying paint; almost no sense of color, almost no sense of style, but just enough of each to avoid being anti-color or -style. I felt immediately that Ben's work was just too clunky for me. Very uninspired in every category involved in arranging paint on a surface.

On the other side of Steven is Sharon Butler of -- as Oly and I said over each other as she introdcued me to the work -- Two Coats of Paint. Hers is probably the most professional, serious, best work in the show. Somehow Sharon has painted a few small works here -- there are two on the Website and I think there were four, maybe five, in the gallery -- which look as if they were painted in the heyday of geometric abstraction in the 1940s. Her color scheme is almost the same as Morandi's, maybe a little more colorful in some cases. I found the effect kind of neat, but at the same time I had to wonder: Are these homage or pastiche? Are they sincere or ironic? Does Sharon come naturally to this style, or is she deliberately copying? As I looked at the paintings I found this cognitive dissonance eroding my faith in my appreciation of them.

I made a motion towards one of the panels, which looked as if a chunk had been taken out of it with a circular saw. "Don't touch that," Oly warned me, "it's alarmed."

On the way out -- or on the way in, if you turned right at the ugly monkey -- are the last (or first) two works in the show, two pieces by Reese Inman; like Sharon, she was chosen by Joanne. From viewing distance Reese's works appear to be made up of dots of different size and color glued to a flat surface. The resulting grid is clearly reminiscent of a computer graphic. Move closer and you see, not dots glued to the surface, but what look like raised spots that may have been left after the surrounding surface was removed, as if by a router. The dots themselves have a certain color shift on top that looks more like layers that were sanded through than colors layered additively. The result is much less than the sum of its parts, though: For how much visual interest her labor-intensive techniques add, she might as well be gluing plastic dots down. Visually the two works are mildly interesting, with that added "How does she do that?" fillip; but ultimately interest flags due to the narrow color range and staid pattern. Go to Reese's site and you'll get a lovely explanation of how these relate to computer algorithms and musical experiments and so forth, all of which I'm sure is very exciting if you have Asperger's and are up past your bedtime, but which wrap up into extremely dull paintings.

Many years ago, back when I was still in college, I had this idea that I was going to pursue being a fine artist more seriously. I was living just over the river from Manhattan and figured, hey, now's the time. I'd read an ad in the back of a magazine requesting artist submissions for a New York gallery and decided to give it a try.

I spent several days carefully taking slides of my paintings and a few drawings. Slides! That's how long ago this was! I didn't have the right equipment but I'd managed to scrape enough funds together to buy some clip-lights and photoflood bulbs and some professional slide film for my 35mm camera and an 18% gray card. I also had grit and determination and stick-to-itiveness and all those other good old American values that lead to success. Also a magazine article detailing the steps to taking good slides of artwork, because this was before you could go on the World Wide Web and get a tutorial. I set up in my dorm room and took my slides and got them developed for some ungodly amount of money and sent them off.

One day I heard back from the gallery. I'm not sure how I heard from them. I guess they wrote me a letter -- they couldn't have called me because I didn't have a phone and almost no one outside of college had e-mail (how did we ever survive those benighted times?). I heard back from them that they were interested and wanted me to come in for a meeting.

I was flattered and excited. This could be the break I was looking for! I hadn't ever considered a career in fine art, or any art at all for that matter, because I'd thought it was an impossible dream. But this gallery -- a New York gallery -- was interested in me!

So I made the trip into Alphabet City, which was still, at the time, a dicey neighborhood. I'd brought a friend with me as protection. We found the gallery, the only one on the block, a few steps down from the street, quiet and empty except for the gallery representative I was to meet with.

We talked about my work and she seemed to be taking it very seriously. She mentioned my use of color and the violence inherent in my drawings especially. She seemed mildly distracted, a little flaky around the edges, but she spoke in somber tones and seemed very professional. It was with the utmost professionalism, then, that she finally introduced the gallery's rate sheet: This much for a show, this much for publicity for the show, this much for refreshments at the show, and so on.

I walked home with my friend, crestfallen and confused. I couldn't believe this was how galleries -- New York galleries -- did business. I had always thought they took chances on artists they believed in, hoping that sales of the work would pay for their expenses. It never occurred to me that they might charge the artist for these services. It seemed...unfair. I worked out fairly quickly that this was something of a scam. And anyway it was a moot point: I'd barely gotten the money together to make slides, I couldn't afford the cost of a show with this gallery.

I dropped the dream of being a fine artist. Clearly it wasn't for me. My parents were right: The important thing was having a real job, somewhere I could make money and get promoted to management and wear a shirt and tie and one day retire with a pension and an annuity and health benefits. The important thing was getting a degree from a good school, which is what I went back to that day.

Of course what I narrowly missed getting entangled in was a vanity gallery. Vanity galleries are considered beneath contempt in the art world. It took me many, many years before I'd even stick a toe back into the New York art scene, but when I did, I learned that, while a layperson might not be able to tell a real gallery from a vanity gallery, everyone involved in the scene knew which were which and saw the vanity galleries as what they are, namely scams run by unscrupulous scum preying on the gullible and ignorant. Vanity galleries are so far beneath notice you'd be hard-pressed to get a reputable dealer to even discuss their existence. And as for the artists who exhibit there, well, at best they're misguided fools, and at worst no-talent zeroes who can't get their work shown anywhere else. Paying someone to allow your work to be shown? That's no road to success.

Unless, apparently, you can buy a nice enough venue. For example, the Brooklyn Museum. They've whored out some of their precious real estate to the Rubell family and allowed them to mount the show Hernan Bas: Works from the Rubell Family Collection. Right there on the official Website it says they got their pet curator Mark Coetzee -- he's the former "Director of the Rubell Family Collection" -- to "organize" the show. So a collector of an artist, who presumably has some financial stake in the artist's reputation, gets to show the works they've collected in a museum, thus improving the artist's standing. Pretty good deal. Everybody wins: The museum gets a show on the cheap, maybe even some kickback donations; the artist gets a career boost, even if he's a Feeblist of such poor standing he's beneath such luminaries as Peyton and Dumas; the collector gets an improved return on investment as the artist's standing improves; and the director/organizer gets a paycheck for doing nothing but moving the works he recommended from one wall to another. Everybody wins!

Oh, wait, I forgot. Everybody wins except you, the art viewer. You're forced to look at crap instead of good art. Check out the Emperor's naked pimply ass. If you're lucky, maybe he'll fart in your face.

One of the deep questions of philosophy -- perhaps the only question, really -- is this: Why do we do the things we do? I ask myself this often, especially when I find myself mired in something I really regret having started. There I am, sprawled on the couch with the jar of honey, two Bic pens with erasable ink, a bag of cedar shavings, half a bottle of tepid Poland Spring, and a #27 Torx screwdriver, and I wonder, what the heck was I thinking?

More frequently, though, I find myself in the middle of a fervent online conversation, desperately parsing yards and yards of electronic text, feverishly interleaving quoted parts of previous stages of the argument with carefully worded rebuttals, each delicately balanced on that sawhorse of clarity and contempt peculiar to online discourse. I spend hours and hours on these things, not every day but in fits, and when I think of the time I could've spent writing something more constructive -- like this, say -- I shudder and go pale. And the question I must ask myself is this: Why do I do these things I do? Or, more particularly: Why, when I see someone has written something incredibly stupid, do I feel I have to correct them?

Because that's what this comes down to. My need to correct things. Not that I'd claim I'm always absolutely right. I know I'm not. I'm wrong all the time. I'm wrong so often I don't know why I ever believe anything I say. But still I see something I think is stupid and I absolutely have to make it clear that I don't agree. Why can't I leave it alone? Why can't I just let it slide, let whatever it is sit there, harmlessly boneheaded, redounding to the discredit of the original author? Why do I need to get involved?

I've done a lot of soul searching on this over the years and I can tell you in no uncertain terms what it is not. I don't do it to look good. I don't do it to prove how smart I am, or to show off. I don't do it to show how wrong anyone else is or to make anyone else look dumb. I'm not trying to leave the world breathless with my awesomeness. Because if I were, I'd hope I'd have learned by now that it doesn't work. No one loves a pedant even when they're right, and I'm wrong way too often anyhow.

And yet I persist. An acquaintance writes a brief note about President Obama and the Freedom of Choice Act and I spend half a day debunking the story and then arguing with her about abortion, a subject I very pointedly have no opinion at all on. (She defriended me on Facebook by the time we were done.) Mark Cameron Boyd makes an offhand remark in reply to J.T. Kirkland's status line on Facebook and it metastasizes into a Proust-sized tome of aggrieved whinging on the subject of not a whole lot in particular. (Mark defriended me on Facebook by the time we were done.) Or Franklin -- himself no slouch in the Department of Pedantry -- corrects my use of "quadriplegic" and I correct his correction. (We're still friends. For now.)

In fact, have I told you how Franklin and I met? Someone, I forget who -- I think it was J.T. -- posted a quote from and a link to the Walter Darby Bannard Archive, an online compendium of all of Darby's articles and essays. I liked them, agreed with them, found them interesting, and started reading the whole shebang -- and noticed some errors here and there, mostly from the (largely automated) transcription from print to digital text. This bothered me, so I began sending corrections to the keeper of the archive, who happened to be Franklin. From there I visited his blog and made some comments and we swapped more friendly e-mail and then one day I realized we were friends. We've since gotten together in person a few times and hit it off just as well in real life as we did online.

Did I start copyediting Darby's writing because I like trying to tell a capital I from a lowercase L in a sans serif typeface? No I did not. Was I trying to impress Franklin, a guy I didn't even know? Not at all. Currying favor with Darby Bannard? Um, no. Would any normal person take on such a job, for free, just because they felt like it? I doubt it. So what was I doing?

I think I know what I was doing. I was doing for someone else that which I'd hope they'd do for me. I truly want to be corrected. If I make a spelling error, I would like it pointed out. If I use a word incorrectly, I want to know about it. If I have my facts wrong -- or totally don't know what I'm talking about -- I want someone to tell me.

Because simply knowing something is important to me. I don't understand why, exactly. But it is. My curiosity is infinite. It cannot be satisfied. I want to know everything there is know about everything. I want to speak all languages and read all the dead ones. I want to know how a bird flies, how to tell a turkey vulture from a hawk, and why the hedgehog can never be buggered at all. I read once about how there are some pigments used by Aborigines in Australia which are completely secret: No white person can know where they come from, how they're made, or even how they're used. Secrets! In this day and age! I was horrified.

To me, simply knowing is a virtue. I don't know why I feel that way but I do. I have an endless capacity for absorbing facts. The other day I went on a field trip with my son and his sixth grade Turkish class. Yes, he's taking Turkish in sixth grade. We all went to a nearby Turkish cultural center. There I fell into a conversation with one of the other parents and my son's teacher, who is herself Turkish. I was able to talk intelligently about Turkey and its inferiority complex because I've picked up a few things here and there about the place. And I learned something I didn't know: It would be illegal for my son's teacher to wear her Muslim headscarf to work in Turkey. They're so desperate not to be seen as a backward nation, so eager to appear secular, that they're curtailing religious expression.

I find stuff like that fascinating.

So at last this is me: I argue not to teach, but to learn. I want to be relieved of the burden of my ignorance.

I understand this is weird. It seems to me that most people would rather stay ignorant. And discussing things upsets some people so much they'd rather stop being my friend than continue. And if they don't want to be my friend any more -- even of the Facebook variety -- so be it. Not that I'm dumb enough to blame them entirely for being upset. I'm not going to stand here and tell you that anyone who defriends me over an argument does so because they're intellectually weak, although I'd like to think so. I know I can be abrasive, insulting, dismissive, frustrating and difficult, as well as a number of other even less-pleasant things. I don't mean to be, and I try not to be, but, well, it doesn't always work.

Still it seems to me that some people would rather remain ignorant, holding on to their wrong-headed beliefs, settling in as dwarfish, stunted creatures in their tiny cramped holes. Whatever makes them happy, I guess. I'd rather crawl outside and stretch and see some new stuff, even if the attempt to stand up straight and walk means tripping over my own feet and landing in the mud most of the time.

I read somewhere that mud is good for you.

Speaking of Lisa Yuskavage: At her opening on February 19, I saw Chuck Close cruising around in his extremely cool wheelchair, which can rear up on two wheels. It's called an iBot and is apparently no longer being made despite how awesome it is. Being able to go up on its hind wheels like that has the salutary effect of a) making the user look like a badass cyborg Transformer and b) bringing the user's face up to eye level so they don't have to feel like they're being talked down to all the time.

For those of you who don't know: Mr. Close suffered a spinal artery aneurysm which left him a quadriplegic thirty years into his nearly fifty-year-long (so far) art career. I didn't realize he relies on a wheelchair until I saw Joe Fig's sculpture of him. I found out then that we both use Gamblin paints -- so we have something in common, that we're both former airbrush artists who now use Gamblin. Sometime later I saw a documentary about his career which filled in more details.

I greatly admire Mr. Close. I can only imagine the difficulties and frustrations he's had to face. It seems to me to be bad enough to find oneself paralyzed; to be paralyzed when you're an artist is that much worse; and then to be a paralyzed airbrush artist -- I don't think anyone who hasn't airbrushed can appreciate the level of precision, control, and practice it requires. Mr. Close's airbrush works show he was an absolute master of his instrument. To have all that taken away -- I've heard about more than one painter who, after having a stroke paralyzing their dominant arm, re-learned to paint using their other hand. That's impressive. But what Mr. Close has done is an order of magnitude more difficult.

I wish I could've talked to him to tell him how much I admire him. But I couldn't bring myself to do it. Instead, I'm telling you.

When I read that Lisa Yuskavage was having a new show at Zwirner (February 19, 2009 to March 28, 2009) I looked forward to seeing what she was up to. I liked Lisa's work. Several years ago I'd made a trip down to Philadelphia specifically to see her first solo museum show there. But since then I hadn't seen any of her paintings in person, or anyway not many. So I thought I'd enjoy her latest show.

I don't know if, over the past few years or so, I've become more demanding or Lisa's gotten worse. But, damn, these are some crappy-ass paintings. They look like color studies for some triple-X animated feature, like pre-production work for some awful Ralph Bakshi abortion. Each one is slipshod from start to finish, as if she threw them together at the last minute. And since Zwirner's gallery runs the length of the block, I found it telling that most of the space was closed -- did she not have enough work? What's she been doing since her last show?

Lisa still has a nice line at times, some curvy forms which, in another context, might pass for what's often called "sensuous". But here it's put in service of content so puerile, technique so desultory, and composition so lifeless, it's completely wasted. The series of paintings here is almost autistic in its obsessive repetition, except no autistic person would ever browbeat anyone so mercilessly with their desire to be accepted. This collection of paintings nearly whimpers in its asking to be loved for the tricks that worked so well in the past; overall it's not so much shocking or outrageous as it is pitiable and sad.

I get the same whiff from Lisa's paintings as I do from John Currin's, namely that of a painter elevated to stardom before they had any idea what they were doing. Now she's groping around trying to figure out what to do next -- giant babies in harsh locales? Fat vulvas in flooded rooms? Twats as landscapes? -- without having the slightest idea what got her where she is. Particularly disingenuous are the few "pie face" paintings here: Is it whipped cream? Is this bukkake? Maybe it's supposed to be an attempt to stir up controversy, but the only contoversy I see is why such sophomoric content and hamfisted technique is left out where people can see it.