Another view of St. Emilion, 11x14 oil on canvas.
In a thoughtful New Yorker article called "The Art of Dying," art critic Peter Schjeldahl, contemplating his own death, writes that "snobbery [is] a necessary stage for the insecure until we acquire taste that admits and reflects the variety of experience. To limber your sensibility, stalk the aesthetic everywhere: cracks in a sidewalk, people's ways of walking. The aesthetic isn't bounded by art, which merely concentrates it for efficient consumption. If you can't put a mental frame around, and relish, the accidental aspect of a street or a person, or really of anything, you will respond to art only sluggishly."
Because of this open attitude to the world, he can write the words that follow:
"I like to say that contemporary art consists of all art works, five thousand years or five minutes old, that physically exist in the present. We look at them with contemporary eyes, the only kinds of eyes that there ever are."
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