Looking at looking at art

These two were consummate lookers. I was compelled to look at their looking with as much intensity. Chelsea is at least as much about the lookers as it is the art. So many people looking gives an artist such hope, I think. There is interest when so much of an artist's life is about non-interest, is about solitude and self-discipline, and holding firm in the face of often colossal indifference. Reports of Jim Dine, Andreas Gursky, Tim Hawkinson at Pace Wildenstein, Jean-michel Basquiat, Bill Viola at James Cohan, Robin Rhode, Michael Kalmbach, newcomers Mickaline Thomas, Sean Landers and Dana Schutz, mostly disappointing shows at Metro Pictures, Sonnabende and Luhring Augustine...plus a few bonus tidbits, ham sandwiches at the Neue Galerie, a report on the rather orderly Barnes Exhibit, and very soon the first of a series of interviews with poets and artists. All this sporadically over the next busy, travel-filled weeks.