The incessant media on what art is selling for unsettles me. Not b/c of the dollar amounts. Gawd, not at all. I think this stuff is priceless. But b/c what it does is perpetuates the, most often, inane myth of the celebrity artist and, more profoundly, the not inane at all mechanisms of Foucault’s “author function.” Not that there’s anything wrong with these two things if you’re also talking about the work, but when discussion of the work is completely overlooked…

Think. What if all art, all literature, all music was stripped of it’s maker, as though it existed in an ideal of formalism, w/o context or name, and it became entirely its form and the event of experiencing it? Would this change how it affects? Only a hypothetical, since…well the idea of anonymity intrigues me greatly, but so does putting food on my plate…someday I hope I can join Pynchon on an island somewhere, be neighbors and never know it.

As I’m reading JR right now, this is a fitting Gaddis quote:

I feel like part of the vanishing breed that thinks a writer should be read and not heard, let alone seen. I think this is because there seems so often today to be a tendency to put the person in the place of his or her work, to turn the creative artist into a performing one, to find what a writer says about writing somehow more valid, or more real, than the writing itself.

-from his Nation Book Awards acceptance speech for JR in April of 1976

Andy Warhol, Green Car Crash, 1963.

Mark Rothko, White Center, 1950, Private Collection