Painting is a way of thinking, 3

I've been involved in one of these heavy but invigorating email exchanges that leave you feeling like you could do anything, and that you absolutely must stop doing certain things immediately.

if you want to know a really bad secret, that i am not at all proud of but whatever.... I avoid lots of new work in the "art world". Just flat out avoid it. Unless i hear recommendations from lots of people, i mostly just wait until work finds me. Why you ask? Just as i think there are keys to open the doors, i think bad work closes them. I have left rooms faster than you can blink that have bad paintings in them. I feel like i am corrupting myself to look at them....

I couldn't agree more, and it is with the same sentiment that I delete blogs from the blog roll. Suppose I was a devout Catholic and I kept being invited to parties at the local porn shop ? I think there is a better example... and for that I will turn to Berman's discussion of Bateson, again:

There is no such thing as a schizophrenic person. There is only a schizophrenic system. The mother in such a system is in the position of controlling the child's definitions of its own messages, and (deutero-) teaches it a reality based on a false discrimination of those messages. She also forbids the child to use the metacommunicative level, which is that level ordinarily used to correct our perception of messages, and without which such normal relationships become impossible.

Now imagine all of your friends are in marketing and you're at the opening. The meta-message is "this is all such garbage but we have to go cause we want to make it as artists." But because so many of your friends went to Yale this meta-message is crushed in the NBC style of living and breathing where everything is possible with the right amount of marketing. Except of course, actual perception.

Actual perception invlves, as Berman discusses, both the perception of the message itself, and the perception of the context or meta-message. He uses examples such as the schizophrenic being approached by a waitress who offers him "anything you like." A normal person is able to distinguish that this message is limited to items on the menu.

Your gallery is offering rather a stale plate of slimey eggs my friends. More later. Happy weekend.