The composer La Monte Young remarked that if he doesn't transport his listeners to heaven, he's not doing his job. How many artists today work by such ambitious standards, let alone do their job? What do critics then do when artists go on a disorganized anti-art strike?

My entry into art was haphazard. Beyond the general presence of images of art in my home (reproductions of Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso) and now-forgotten visits to museums at an early age, my first real encounters with art occurred at the movie theater, to which my parents would take me often . . .

I am stupid, I am ungifted, I am awkward, but I pray to you, tall spruces. I am quite awkward, I am… a coward. Yesterday, I was frightened of a man I don't respect. It's because of my cowardice that I can't learn to ride a bicycle. I haven't enough will power for anything, but I pray to you, tall spruces.

According to a young Courbet, whatever we encounter en masse today might just as well need to be considered a (neo-) Romanticism, waiting for its own Burial in order to explode the heteronomy of the given and the same in which we constantly entrench ourselves.