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So. There's an art gallery owner in Philadelphia who has an idea that is somewhat similar to ours. Check out her site, which includes a link to a pdf guide to Philadelphia arts and culture. What's fascinating to me so far is that her motives, which are--ultimately--to sell more art, color her planning and gear the hotel, restaurant, and spots to see list towards the affluent. This, despite the fact that part of her (noble, wise, and shrewd) goal is to increase the number of people who buy art at art galleries. It's possible that some of her "recommendations" involve sponsorships...but if you read her writing through, she has what sounds like a very old fashioned way of looking at the world: neighborhoods are crowned "important" and even snack foods are rated "the best." There's a spectre of greatness and stature that is lurking behind the way she writes about the world.

No doubt, there are old fashioned ideas and ideals that underpin my own interests and which sponsor the program that I am putting together on the Big Paper. Connoisseurship is perhaps a froght notion in the post-modern era, but I don't want to let it go. (And I won't.) But we need to be selecting and evaluating expereinces with a richer set of terms than placing them on the big old greatness scale. And part of playing is precisley in this: a playful relationship to an experience, a city, a walk, an art object is simply a fuller, richer experience than an experience which is focused on estimating the level of "greatness" in it.

The distinction between "great" and "not great" is, finally, a phony one--or at least one that need not have any real impact on my own experience of it in the moment. Great/Not Great may BE a difference, but it is not a very interesting difference. What I take (first from Stein, but it really undergirds almost all of the processes I try to be engaged in as an artist and teacher) to be true is that there are MANY kinds of difference and that experiencing the full diversity of differences is what gives us a) the capacity to approach Knowing and b) the ability to minimize kinds of difference (of race, class, gender, orientation) that our culture tends to highlight, as a strategy of oppression.

OK, so the politics of this is out of the bag. Well, alright. But I don't find the Political/Not Political spectrum to be any more worth Overpriviliging than any other. Or that's my operating principal this morning, anyway. I am very interested in Bridget Mayer's program--and I share her enthusiasm for helping more people to come to live more closely to art and to expereinces of the culture of our time. Changing the way that people think about art objects and experiences is a very important impulse. As is thinking through the natural biases that flow through all of our efforts to make the world better.