I’m not going to launch a critique of the 6.2 banana incident — Instagram commenters have taken care of that for me already.

What I want to get into is the seeming loss of traditional values in the arts and the elevation of performance, ego, and money above those things that have always sustained the arts: history, technique, standing on the shoulders of giants, color, shapes, drawing, light. Let’s take Basquiat, the soaring symbol of New York street art breaking through into the fine arts world in the 1980s for example. He was grounded in technique. Often erroneously, people look at his work and think his graphic scribbles were lucky strikes (or strokes). Nothing could be further than the truth. As every abstract artist who has a decent teacher in art school knows, abstract artists are regularly told that their path to improving their abstraction lies in improving traditional drawing skills — human anatomy, life drawing, perspective — and realism. In other words, to be abstract, to be conceptual, or to be a street artist — the truly excellent work twice as hard and do twice as much, conquering both classical realism and the methodologies of abstraction or their field.

Basquiat began drawing in New York museums at the age of 6 and studied human anatomy. His work was soaringly popular immediately because it rested in something. It was part of a tradition, a legacy, and stood in that legacy to create something new that had never been done.

That’s talent. That’s art. That’s the creative life.

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I wish I could give you the formula for how to slip beyond the veil where paintings create themselves. It’s like this: you will never know which days or moments that you are living will be the meaningful ones. You see, humans cannot hold fast to the meaning of it all when we are busy living at the same time. You will see snails and seaweed and an eclipse of the sun. You will hold a small hummingbird in your hands, listen a piece of music — but you won’t remember any of these things. You will remember the weddings, the time you graduated, your bonus check. You will remember the feeling of buying a new car. You will remember the birth of your daughter, the smell of her head.

All the other things become strange magic inside you, buried.

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I recently became obsessed with lighting design. I first felt this obsession while sitting in a hot swirly pool at a spa in the depths of Russian Brooklyn surrounded by Ukranian lovers. I looked up and saw that the chandelier was a huge woven fish. A huge woven fish lit up from the inside at once elegant, playful and full of vibe. Here are the things I did, once I became obsessed…

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