The impassioned disputations on taste and aesthetics at the now-maligned Salons were disputations on ethics, morals, and politics. As in our art world, taste was an advocacy vehicle for the Good, if hardly for the same Good.

This is The West, I think: where fantasy displaces the real for profit. As a transplant to the state of Texas, I have a strange desire to see that displacement, which is why I’ve come here, expecting the Marfa Invitational to bring this phenomenon into stark relief. 

Imagine this. You’re six, and you’re playing in the sand pit arranging piles of grainy earth into neat, abstract pyramids.

Neuroscientists tell us that what comes to the retina of the eye is only a part—and not even the largest part—of what we see.