I’ve few claims to expertise in the art world. What I can say is that at this point I’m a world citizen. Lived in Paris 10 years, India in all but the monsoon, in Belgium, Amsterdam, St. Tropez, Budapest, Montreal, New Orleans for months at a time. And I’m a citizen of that world state called New York City.

But then I’ve always come to a field from the outside. And somehow that leverage point sometimes moves mountains and incestuous traditions as stubborn as an ingrown toenail. Let’s just say I’m non-academic, a fountain of utter admiration of creation in all its forms – and of artists in particular as the ultimate explorers.

Out with the old Paris dealers, Italian patrons, Dutch middle class decorators, middle class art fairs, Mad Ave star system and monetized art in general. In with the online, the happenings, and the conversation of art. In with the incubators, the transformation of the old crucibles of creation, factories, into art studios renting for $500 a month – as our friend Press has done in New Orleans.

Art that seethes, art that is raw, art that speaks. Including street art, starting with those magnificent 3D artists and the computer compositors such as the op-artist reinvented as compuartist, Fred Bookhardt – and yes, as brilliantly laid forth in excruciatingly embarassing yet utterly real internet porn sites. Art is now everywhere except occasionally in the galleries.

We’re art bums, Giorgio and me. We wander the world in search of that kind of experience we had today in the Staedelijk: walking into a room, feeling we’d stumbled in on a reunion of very old friends, losing all sense of time, utterly in rapture at the assemblage, lighting, placement, limits on what was shown. We hang out in artist studios, sit in Buddhist and Friends meditation in front of works of art for no important reason. You might say we’re in love – with the re-creation of life into art.