"...and then all this talk of painting and orgasms got me thinking: was all I wanted, as a thirty-something single woman living in New York City, staring me in the face at last night's art opening? Did every girl round here just want to be Edie Sedgwick? And was Samantha right: Do artists give the best head?"

Hey PAUL ET AL, what difference does that make? I'm not old enough to have known Herge or Celine, but I still know about the debate surrounding their work. If you can form opinions about artists' work by seeing them in exhibitions, you can do the same about the artists themselves from interviews, biographies or whatever.

detlev, I'm shocked. Trying to turn my thread into a salacious kiss and tell, tsk... ( but who the hell are Carrie and Petrovsky?)

ohmigod i'm so shocked

Was it something I said or have you just managed to shock yourself?

no - shocked that you didn't know. petrovsky is the famous russian artist who swept carrie off her feet, made her re-locate to Paris from New York and neglected her.

Though I've never watched an episode in my life I believe he's talking about 'Sex in the City'.

is it not one of the majour drawbacks of the prevalent sloppy art criticism that they phychoanalyse the artist rather than appreciate or critizize the aesthetic beauty of the artists work?
and viz-a-vee this thread are we really not talking about the artist as celebrety and a would-be curators grandoise notions of having power over them?
as if their personality mattered and it was a matter of the artist being nice to get an exhibition....whoa...please!

Well speak of the devil...

yes yes that's all very well but have any of you SLEPT with an artist? you people don't catch on very quickly, do you?

Anyway, without trying too hard to turn the dial back to boring, I think you should discuss the question of artistic identity today and the notion of self-mythology. Isn't an artist's identity in many cases a carefully constructed product in just as much as their work is? (i guess the question i'm asking is - are people just getting sick of this duality because a lot of 'bad art' is being glossed over simply because the artist in question knows how to shoot ping pong balls from her fanny etc?)

detlev! I understood fine the first time - et c'est toi qui est hors sujet? And anyway, how did we go from the highly romantic SATC to ping pong?