Hasta La Ideas

“Those things that you hate for so long are insidiously working on you, until one day you can’t resist them anymore. They turn into favorites. It just takes a while to sort out the complications in them. Those artworks that come all ready to love empty out pretty quickly. It’s why outsiders hate the art we love; they haven’t spent time with it. You and I see things again and again whether we want to or not. We seem them in galleries, we seem them in homes, we seem them in art magazines, they come up at auction. Outsiders see it once, or hear about it after it’s been reduced to an insult: ‘It’s a bunch of squiggles that my kid could do.’ I would like to see a kid who could paint a Jackson Pollock. In a half second, any pro could tell the difference. People want to think Pollock’s not struggling, that he’s kidding. He’s not kidding. You want to know how I think art should be taught to children? Take them to a museum and say, ‘This is art, and you can’t do it.’”

-Art world mover and shaker Patrice Claire, a character in Steve’s Martin‘s many-splendored new novel, An Object of Beauty (Grand Central), explaining his theory of “the perverse effect”—or how we stopped worrying and learned to love George Condo

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