Art Usually Only Makes The News In

I Wish I Could Write About Shows Outside New York. I Often Feel Like The Last Person To Know Anything, Because I Almost Never Get To Leave Town, And When I Do, I Tend To Go For Three Days Max. Seeing Between 30 And 40 Shows A Week In 100 Or So Galleries And Museums Takes Up Nearly All My Time.

Imagine It's 1981. You're An Artist, In Love With Art, Smitten With Art History. You're Also A Woman, With Almost No Mentors To Look To; Art History Just Isn't That Into You. Any Woman Approaching Art History In The Early Eighties Was Attempting To Enter An Almost Foreign Country, A Restricted And Exclusionary Domain That Spoke A Private Language.

The Last Time Money Left The Art World, Intrepid Types Maxed Out Their Credit Cards And Opened Galleries, And A Few Of Them Have Become The Best In The World.

Koons's Work Has Always Stood Apart For Its One-at-a-time Perfection, Epic Theatricality, A Corrupted, Almost Sick Drive For Purification, And An Obsession With Traditional Artistic Values.

I Don't Often Go To Curator Or Artist Walk-throughs Of Exhibitions. For A Critic, It Feels Like Cheating. I Want To See Shows With My Own Eyes, Making My Own Mistakes, Viewing Exhibitions The Way Most Of Their Audience Sees Them.