David X Young created the fictional character of "Juan Osaka McFelsnir" to draft this 'interview' where he discussed his art.

SOME CULTURE YOU MAY HAVE MISSED; AN INVESTIGATION BY JUAN OSAKA MCFELSNIR

JOM: I was going though some of your things and I ran across this; MICKEY'S GRIN ---1957. That's four or five years before Lichtenstein!!!

DXY: Comic strip imagery interested me a lot at one time-- it's the art of childhood, after all--- especially in those days when the Clement Greenberg canon held that no recognizable image could be painted-- all had to be 'abstract'---but, you know, Jackson had his drip and Dekooning his whiplash line--- well, Chester Gould had a distinctive penstroke for Dick Tracy's nose--- I wondered if materials like that could be used to make real paintings. But the problem was that they always called attention to their sources---as cartoons, not paintings. Litchenstein evidently didn't care about that! Nor did Castelli, nor anyone else. I guess. It's strange, because before that he was a pretty good cubist painter. Hello Dada!! It's the old vanguard game; Shock, Rationalize, Sell. And they sure did!!!!

JOM: But MICKEY'S GRIN has got to have some historical value!! 1957!! It should be made aware of, promoted.

DXY: Go ahead, if you want. I have no skill at those things.

JOM: I'll put it in my report. What is interesting is that it's not flatly painted, like Litchenstein--- rougher, more energetic, even passionate---like Van Gogh.

DXY: I guess you could make a case for that. Both ears, however.

JOM: How to price it?

DXY: What did the last Van Gogh go for (or should I say Gogh for?)?

JOM: Sixty four million, I think.

DXY: Well, let's up this to sixty five, what the hell!

JOM: Japan couldn't handle that, with their economy crumbling as it is----

DXY: Well, there might be some European principality that dares to go under.

JOM: Come ON!! This is ridiculous. Millions!!

DXY: Well, we could always haggle.

JOM: I suppose. But it's just too much.

DXY: Well look; I bled on a postage stamp once and out of curiosity--or perhaps vanity, saved it.

DXY: We could offer that for three bucks. Now you have a price range.

JOM: That's quite a range. Two ninety-five?

DXY: Naw. Fair is fair --- plus shipping and handling, of course!! ---

JOM. : Painter, photographer and filmaker David X Young is in his sixties but there are times when he seems and looks much younger. He lives alone in a loft on Canal St in Manhattan he has held since 1964, though he sometimes makes sojurns to his roots in New England, Cape Cod, Maine, and also Haiti, which he has visited regularly since 1955. In the fifties, in a loft in the flower district of Manhattan, he ran jam sessions for 5 or 6 years where nearly everyone in the jazz world came to play. He has made several documentary films, one of which, THE ROOTS OF THE COLD WAR for Arthur Schlesinger Jr, sold steadily to colleges from 1969 to the late eighties when Gorbachev turned things around. Another film, KLAXIMO, so shocked the avant-garde of 1965 that it has rarely been shown publicly. But it is as a painter that he began as an artist and continues to the present. I find the whole of the work extraordinary; inventive, highly varied-- that of an undiscovered master. The late art dealer Charles Egan, who first exhibited Kline and Dekooning, has called him "One of the Boston/New York artists who honestly developed from that controversial period of American Art." But Young makes a very thin issue out of himself and hardly anyone has heard of him. I tried to find out why.

JOM: You seem to be fairly accomplished. Why haven't we heard from you before?

DXY: The four Fs.

JOM: You mean you were--- 4F-- in what, the draft?

DXY: Yes, that too, but not what I meant. Four separate Fs. Funding---- lack thereof. Family--- hostilities on both generational ends-- Friends-- who really weren't, etcetera.

JOM: The first is the old starving artist story, of course. Cliche but often true---Second; family objects to your being an artist-- another cliche.

DXY: And also true.

JOM: But these are times when art is making a lot of money, certainly, and there is a public awareness and acceptance of art that didn't used to be. Why isn't your---

DXY: When I started out, there was absolutely none at all, except, say, for Norman Rockwell. And I was interested in Pollock! Holy smoke!

JOM: Which gave your family plenty of ammunition to object, of course.

DXY: Oh sure! Mad guy just heaving paint all over the place. And they were Cape Cod puritans, so they had a moral prejudice against art to begin with. But believe me, they are hypocrites. If I had made a lot of money they would be kissing my ass in wonder---- while talking behind my back, too. Fortunately they are mostly dead for the moment.

JOM: But you have spent most of your time in New York City.

DXY: Oh yeah-- I had to get away from all that stuff initially. And there was only one place to go. Boston was culturally dead as nails in the fifties. The vanguard action was all New York, the real painters and the best jazz musicians as well. One had to go there or stagnate. It was an atmosphere more than anything specific. It was hip, it was hot, it was free, it was full of surprises-- not all of them pleasant ones, of course, but nowhere else could you bathe in that particularly wonderful, outrageous and nourishing input. Unfortunately it was only a brief time in the sun. It didn't last too long, but at first I thought it would be forever.

JOM: How long was it for you?

DXY: About seven or eight years, thassall. No; maybe ten. Let's see; I came here in fifty-three-- when Jack Kennedy died, ten years later-- then everything began to change. In came the Beatles, which killed jazz, and then Pop Art, which killed painting. But those were ten great years. You know, one of the important things about it was that the abstract expressionists--- hell I hate that term-- the New York painters-- had taken the focus away from Paris and brought it postwar to New York. For that while -- that ten years-- it was where to be, where the action was, and it was a very upbeat, optimistic time, full of possibilities.

JOM: Most of the history of that time says the opposite-- that those painters were very depressed, alchoholic, despairing people.

DXY: Oh, that's Rauschenberg's shtick. He was trying to distinguish himself from them. Happier, you know. O Joyful creator, me!! O Gay!! O hubba hubba!! Sure, the older guys drank, but in one respect that was an accident of Bohemian tradition. They used to hang out at night in a Waldorf's on 8th street, a cafeteria type place, but in the late forties it got torn down. So they moved a block or so away to the Cedar Bar, where a beer was not much more than a cup of coffee, and one thing led to another. Another thing at that time was the fashion for psychoanalysis-- most everyone who could afford it was going to a shrink. Most of the painters couldn't--- certainly I never could-- and wasn't interested in the first place. But I'd run into guys who couldn't help talking about their latest session, or the particular quality of their state of mind. One day one fellow on the street told me his misery was such that he felt like "shit thinned out with dishwater" ( that's got to be a classic). So "despair" was in the air, just like "revolution" was in the sixties. People wore it like suits. No big deal.

JOM: But generally the fifties are defined by the Beat Generation writers, and despair seems very much a part of their writings.

DXY: In the late fifties the Beats moved in, promoted woe and tried to associate themselves with the painters and the jazz musicians, but they were really just promoting themselves. I thought they were obnoxious. And boring.

JOM: Really?

DXY: Yes. Careerism. But to be fair, I must add that I interviewed Allan Ginsburg in the early seventies for a film and liked him better-- he was very consistent, even though I didn't share his convictions. But Kerouac stunk.

JOM: Wow, that's intense!

DXY: Literally, I mean. I used to go to the Half Note a lot to dig Zoot and Al. One crowded night the bar was completely empty except for one guy, and above that the band played, so I went to the bar immediately. The guy was Kerouac-- his body odor was intense all right--- it was grotesque, and he was drinking cheap wine. That's why the bar was empty. Even the band got wafts. And later on, you know, he got very racist-- bulldoze all the blacks into the sea, etcetera. He never really got away from his mother, whatever that's worth. Let's go back to the painters; more interesting.

JOM: So they weren't as depressed as the legends go.

DXY: I think those legends had something to do with lowering the auction prices of the paintings to boost the poppers instead. Of course there were petty jealousies, all that, here and there by the lesser guys, but for me it was a very positive time. Jackson of course was a terrible drunk, but more like a cowboy shooting up the joint than anything morose. It was a terrific energy, but sober he was very shy and even gentle. To see him in action that way made it easy to understand how he could heave the paint. Better than him, though, Kline was a very articulate, sweet, witty guy, whimsical with an edge and a far more wonderful painter. Before he died, those color ones-- incredible. Dekooning was more outrageous at times with that funny dutch accent and unconscious punning but well--- ideas! They had ideas! For a young kid like myself they opened doors -- many doors. Jackson, Franz and Bill-- they were the ones that counted. Pollock broke the ice all right, but the other two-- wonderful painters, joyful to see. Much to learn from.

JOM: And Rothko?

DXY: Not Rothko. Pompous perfumed space, that's all. I saw him a few times at the artist's club, standing around like Buddha--- " projecting his essence ". All attitude, and with fugitive colors, yet. Bill and Franz, straight ahead guys, had none of that. I liked Clifford Still, though I never met him. Heard he was a bit sourpuss. Estaban Vincente-- I think he's still with us-- also wonderful, if unsung. He had the only show in all the Soho years that impressed me--- I mean, made me want to run home and grab a brush and carry on.

JOM: Philip Guston?

DXY: One night, just before Bill's 1958 show at Janis, I was with Franz at the Cedar and a sort of bar groupie chick when Bill came in all afuss--- LIFE had been running a series on the GIANTS OF AMERICAN PAINTING or some such title and had just done one on Dekooning. and he was insisting he wasn't an American painter, he was a dutchman-- "I vant to paint pictures of men leaning against lamposts in brown colors" he said. "Not dese circus colors I'm using now. De're just backgrounds". Turned out Janis had forced him to have the show as the market was peaking for his work and Bill was not happy with the paintings he felt were unfinished. Janis was right, however-- the show was a sellout.

JOM: Guston?

DXY: Oops-- oh yeah, well, he joined us eventually, and we all carried on, partly spurred by this village chick with us--- Guston at that time was doing things I liked with color, abstract, a sweetness like Bonnard-- "abstract impressionism" was the packaging term--- but he wasn't famous like Bill and Franz--- and seemed less vigorous in the spunk of that evening. Eventually we ended up at my loft with that chick, and at one point everyone was doing square dances around her to Ray Charles records!! Kline accidently busted a ceramic pot of mine and put it on his head like a German helmet and strutted about like a mechanical toy soldier-- hilarious. Later, at dawn, we went to the Battery for clam chowder, and while we were eating, collectors were lining uptown on 57th St to buy the 'circus' Dekoonings. Quite an evening! Well, Guston, he always seemed in the shadow of the other guys, and depressed about it. I invited him to a couple of parties but he never came-- then-- what? Twenty years later or so I saw those KuKluxKlan things with the clumsy impastos--- I guess he was really screeching for attention. I don't like painting that relies so heavily on content that the quality of the painting doesn't matter, and that looked like the case there. He was on television talking about them sometime later but sounded like a blithering idiot to me. Guston sans gusto.

JOM: Well, if you were that close to those men, how come you--

DXY: I told you that's a complicated answer. Let's just go on with it. Fun to reminisce.

JOM: We have to narrow it somehow!!

DXY: You got plenty of tape, haven't you?

JOM: Yes, but---

DXY: Well, all right. A couple of years later I was showing out in Chicago at the Holland-Goldowsky Gallery with all three-- Jackson, Bill, Franz-- and starting to sell, though of course on a much lower price level. But then-- Pop landslided--- The big names survived the onslaught, but I wasn't established enough. Further, I was closer in age to the Poppers but openly hostile to it, which didn't help me with dealer politics. And Henry Geldzahler saw me as a spoiler, and was also pissed that I wouldn't fuck him. I had a show at Zabriskies in 1963 which Brian O'Doherty reviewed in the Times as "a Pop Artist trying to look like a real painter or vice versa. " SHIT! I was absolutely insulted by this. I decided to drop out of the gallery scene for awhile, naively thinking the Pop fad would be over in a few years. That was 35 years ago!!

JOM: Well that makes sense. You quit. Not complicated at all!! But then-- thirty five years--- and you didn't just give it all up. You kept working. Or so it seems---

DXY: Let's come in from another angle. There was a great optimism in the air in the early postwar days. We were heroes! We won the war, beat the bad guys, etc. The joys of freedom were pervasive. Why not throw the paint, try something new? Paris was still staggering under the effects of the war; there was more energy in New York. Picasso, Matisse, still alive---living icons to aspire to with all this energy. And isn't it interesting that the most painterly-- and most inventive artist in New York-- was a dutchman? I felt it was a very affirmative time, very encouraging to the imagination and engaging to the mind.

JOM: Are you suggesting that it was like the days of Cubism at the turn of the century?

DXY: Precisely. All possibilities!! Then came the horrors of World War One and for them it was all over. What came then?

JOM: Dada.

DXY: You do do your homework. The art of despair. The end of possibilities. What happened here after JFK died?

JOM: Pop Art?

DXY: Neo Dada. Something of the soul went out of this country when he was killed. Certainly the optimism went. In came cynicism, the first cousin of despair. But there was another, equally major, factor to consider. Money, honey.

JOM: Yes, art began to make money then. Never happened before quite like that in America, as I understand it.

DXY: Speculative money. Look, none of those guys at the Cedar really ever expected to make it really that big. Sure, they hoped to sell decently, eventually, but never outrageously. Pollock was selling in more in the hundreds than the thousands, and he was more successful than the others at first. I remember one spring day in the Cedar when Kline came in, astonished, waving some car keys. He had just acquired the classic Thunderbird. "This collector just gave me a new car for a painting !" he said.

JOM: More than he ever--

DXY: Look, you coulda bought a Dekooning for fifty bucks in 1950. Ten years later it was fifty thousand. Money was to be made; lots of it. This amazed the painters to be sure-- they were in it for the love of it, essentially-- but the speculative idea was not lost on others. This isn't France, with a tradition of painters-- "the business of America is business" like Coolidge said. More than just painters wanted a piece of that pie-- but greed has no aesthetic. When that happened, factors that had nothing to do with the idea of making a good painting came into the situation.

JOM: But that wasn't a---

DXY: That's good bourbon. I usually don't like bourbon. But it's brown. I like brown stuff. Rolling?

JOM: Yes.

DXY: Where were we?

JOM: Speculation.

DXY; Oh, yeah. History-- Matisse shocked everyone with JOIE DE VIVRE then Picasso shocked him with LES DEMOISELLES D'AVIGNON--- etcetera. Shock gets the attention, then things calm down and a market is made. The vanguard riff is Shock, Rationalize, Sell. Well, the shock of Pollock and Dekooning and Kline had made their market--- you couldn't buy them on the cheap anymore. They were accomplished serious painters. Something new had to come along to shock and sell low so the speculators could grab into the action, and start the wheels rolling. Well, Dada----Neo-dada--- offered the 'shock' sure enough, but also avoided the risk of invidious comparision with those masters. The perfect art-hustle riff. I saw what was happening and was very vocal about it, but most of the other painters my age thought I was crazy. Then boom. Or 'pop'!!!

JOM: Lets see, where did we leave it -- oh yes; "POP" meaning "Art".

DXY: Could just as well have been "F'ART" meaning "False Art."

JOM: Everything changed?

DXY: Jackson was long dead, Kline died in 1962, Dekooning had moved out to build a studio in Easthampton. No one to hold the fort. The good wavelength was over, and the polymorphous perverse moved in. What still impresses me even today is how hated 'abstract expressionism' was -- and still is. Big guilt thing there, somehow. You know? That was real painting. Brush, canvas -- line, form, color -- no agenda. Yes, that's all that art once was -- painting, drawing, sculpture -- plenty of room there to work in, if you got the stuff to handle it, the talent---

JOM: So what did you do then?

DXY: Well, I had spent some time in Haiti and for awhile went back to the Cape to collect myself in familiar surroundings. There I got busted on pot which didn't help---

JOM: Yes. May I quote you?

DXY: Sure. Nobody else does -- you mean, quote 'brown stuff'?

JOM: Just kidding. But yes.

DXY: Well you want an interview -- thanks. I really don't like bourbon but I like to get off. And I think I passed the 'explanation' stage. So let's swing out, daddy-o. What are you anyway? Pakistani?

JOM: My mother was Spanish -- my father, Scottish, I think -- never knew him. He's dead.

DXY: So where do you get this Japanese middle name?

JOM: Hey! I'm interviewing you! We're getting way off track ! I was born in Osaka.

DXY: Gee, you got it all covered. Too bad you're not Jewish, too.

JOM: My mother was Gypsy.

DXY: Holey Moley! You must be pretty smart.

JOM: Smart enough to like your work, at least.

DXY: That's pretty damned smart!

JOM: Well, we've strayed off course again.

DXY: Ziggin' and zaggin'. You know, my 'orientation' -- or passion, if you will, was originally more for music -- jazz -- than painting. Painting was something I could do. Music I wasn't allowed to do, and the mystery and beauty of it was a great magnet for me. A beacon.

JOM: Why weren't you "allowed" ?

DXY: Through some rather complex Hawthornesque reasons my father, a jazz saxophone player, killed himself when I was just a few days old. Whenever I showed a leaning towards music, it was immediately quashed, as if music might make me do the same thing, I guess. So it was in my blood but I couldn't get it out. I became a fan instead. A hepcat I was, just after puberty. Good antidote to my puritan origins -- Boogie Woogie and the Blues. Pete Johnson and Albert Ammons. Solid, Jackson!

JOM: Just like kids today, then. Rebellion. Sex, Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll.

DXY: Not at all! There was no teen mandate like "Sex Drugs and Rock 'n' Roll" in the forties. There was no Rock'n'Roll. It was all just pop dance music. But the best of it had better rhythm, better swing, more balls to it and that was the influence of jazz. If you had good ears you just naturally gravitated to it -- a bit removed from pop, but a Great Noise Down The Street.

JOM: Where there was sex and drugs.

DXY: Certain indiscreet pharmaceuticals, so to speak. Ah, but you took your chances! Party time! We used to put the strips from benzedrine inhalers into coca cola and you'd get quite a rush from it but then you'd be awake for two days. But that was the only thing to work with at that particular time. But dope springs eternal -- Remember the polarity; the few were hip, the many, square. To go to that Great Noise Down the Street one often encountered those dark goodies circulating amongst the hip elite -- but it was more in the Baudelarian sense of the 'systematic degeneration of the senses' than these ghetto monstrosities you hear about today. You could take it or leave it. But dope springs eternal. I was very shy of it for the most part, though I did have my moments.

JOM: Then with all the---

DXY: You gotta remember that in those days -- the fifties -- drugs were pretty much privy to the jazz world and nowhere else. It wasn't any national craze nor fashion. At first it was just pot and juice -- heroin had come in after world war two, but after guys began to O.D. -- Bird was the classic tragic example -- use among most musicians cut way down. Zoot did it cold turkey. I thought it was all over when peyotl came along -- that was 'absolute high' -- or seemed so at the time at least. But by then jazz argot and lifestyle had filtered out into the middle class -- neat sequence there -- hepcats became hipsters then deteriorated to 'hippies' -- and drugs became a big business, a billion dollar business and the whole perspective of having a bit of fun got bloated way out of proportion. Turn on a square and you've got a turned-on square who doesn't know it yet. But to a drug dealer, Square money is more reliable. Big time!

JOM: Then with all the---

DXY: Shut up!! Until EVERYONE thought they were hip, jazzlife could be a unique adventure and a good way of aquiring some innocent pussy -- "come in to my parlor, said the--" get all those innocent young college girls and turn 'em on some pot and get into their pants -- there was a certain witty demonic drama to it then before dope became pervasive. I was a kid, bright hip kid, but kind of shy of chicks and the jazz social atmosphere suited me fine -- most musicians were more interesting, and more witty, to hang out with than most painters. And try to get laid with a Boston Irish chickipoo! Impossible! When I was in art school in Boston --such a waste of time! -- I would go immediately after school about a mile away to Symphony Square, and hang out with guys from the New England Conservatory and further down to the jazz joints on Mass Avenue where Bird and Bechet and Lester occasionally played. Jazz musicians were much brighter, funnier and warmer to hang out with than painting students -- then and now. The-Noise-Down-The-Street was right there at the corner of Mass and Columbus Avenues. And Beautiful noise to boot.

JOM: And when you went to New York City?

DXY: At first Jazz seemed everywhere! And I began to figure a way how to bring that "street" right into my living room.

JOM: The loft.

DXY: The loft. In those days to live in a loft was illegal but for a painter of small means it was the only solution to get substantial work space. I.E; you had to live like an outlaw. Nothing chic about being in a loft in those days. No big real estate loft developers, thank god. You lived out of the law and dirt cheap with many inconveniences -- had to pay off the building inspectors with Christmas tips, steal furniture off the streets, do the wiring and plumbing yourself -- but you also had incredible freedom to make your life whatever way you wanted it to be! And one way I wanted to live was to have jazz very much a part of my life and environment right along with my painting. Luckily I found a loft building not near any people dwellings in the flower district of sixth avenue -- so music could be played with impunity. And I got a cheap piano, had it tuned, and invited my friends to come play anytime in the studio where I painted.

JOM: Simple entrepreneurial.

DXY: Indeed. No effort. And soon it developed its own volition and it seemed, at one time or another, that nearly everyone in the jazzworld passed through. I would go to sleep listening to Monk playing the piano directly below where my bed was, for example. Funny. At the time it seemed no big deal -- just a part of the natural order of things. Of the original guys, Brookmeyer, Jim Hall, Jim Raney, all had tentacles out into the greater jazzworld -- like Getz, Mulligan, Bill Evans, Zoot Sims, Dave Mckenna, Art Farmer, Lee Morgan, Jerry Segal, Lee Konitz, Warne Marsh. and one thing led to another. Teddy Charles brought Mingus around, Jim Hall got wooed by Sonny Rollins, and for awhile Miles lived down the street at the Hotel Arlington. A strange, assorted, but wonderful family. Dick Cary -- a great unsung talent -- plugged into the whole Condon Mob, had worked with Louis Armstrong -- was on the third floor. Hall Overton on the fourth and me on the fifth. Then came Monk, who was working with Hall Overton who was helping to arrange his stuff for a big band. Zowie. For many years, great times, great cross-overs between art and music, and good hip dancing goilies to add some spice. Somewhat later, photographer Gene Smith moved in the building and began to Boswell the whole scene in his inimitable angst fashion.

JOM: Then the fifties were the best years for you?

DXY: The easiest, and most hopeful. All was possible, all was equal -- none of us had any money -- and there weren't any squares messing up the atmosphere. You know, in my loft there was never any lock on the street door? And we really didn't need one. It was a very small community of actual folks -- mebbe 400 serious painters in the whole of Manhattan -- and the jazz world was similar. It was like -- well almost everybody knew everybody else. There was a natural generosity among this world. Dekooning would give me ends of canvas to paint on, people swapped paintings, shared pot and booze. Great loose fun parties -- la vie boheme, simple funky free love carousing, and the great congenial whorehouse music of jazz. But don't think that becaue it was fun it was superficial -- they were all serious musicians with unusual skills and imaginations. and it was a joy for me to hang out with them and to paint while they played and free associate with some very high intelligence (and often some very high people). It was a potent social and aesthetic free energy. An education, too -- the young trumpeter -- later bandleader of a group with strange time signatures -- Don Ellis, came to the loft one night when he was first in town, and sat in with master saxophonist Zoot Sims. (the next day he borrowed the tape to copy and send to his mother!) The loft was rife with those opportunities. The true kind of jazz education you can't get at Juilliard. When jazz went out of business after the Beatles, etc -- for about thirty years -- that great living musical continuity was lost -- now it's Lincoln Center concerts -- jazz as 'art' rather selfconsciously. It is interesting to note that along the time -- for a variety of difficult reasons -- that I began to let the sessions faze out, Wynton Marsalis was in swaddling clothes.

JOM: You mean he didn't invent jazz after all?

DXY: NOW: Jump cut to the sixties -- massive mob scenes in lofts, with ear-blasting rock music, pasty-faced polymorphous perverse all over the place, tinfoil neckties, speed, LSD -- a totally artificial superimposition which wiped out completely the natural vibe from whence it was stolen. ROCK AND ROLL say you! I mean, a lot of the fifties guys may have been a bit over-macho and rough on some of the sweeter lassies, but no one jumped out windows or died of drug overdoses to the extent that they did amongst the Warhol crowd. Call it what you will, that was one helluva sick fruity social mess of a scene.

JOM: Unnatural?

DXY: To the Nth power. The fifties had a natural, organic culture. The sixties were all synthetics. Kink city. Like I said, the turned-on squares. Worse yet, they actually began to define what the art world was -- and which it then became. But they had it all wrong in front, because the motivation was money and power, not to make beautiful things. A gross mediocrity of spirit and very bloated egos. After Warhol, aesthetic standards had sunk so low that any dolt who could make marks on paper could consider himself an artist. You gotta know that is true. One of them I know very well -- I used to think he was a friend of mine, so I tried to encourage him even though it was obvious he had no talent. To my shock -- after many years -- I realized he actually thought he was my equal. Such a coarse ego; full boobus erectus. Show me an egotist today and I'll show you a mediocrity -- it's almost an axiom. This guy's got some money -- probably he stole it somewhere -- more art materials and cameras than I'll ever be able to afford and all he comes up with is shit. To boot, you got all that artspeak -- that phoney intellectuality, which is really pressagentry PR to boost the market. Worse yet, many of those sixties phoney radicals got into colleges and became tenured -- which is why our present educational system is such a disaster. All political correctness is just a fascistic use of fairly simple-minded liberal notions of yore---

JOM: Of my what?

DXY: Come on, Juan!!