It took me a long time to like Rauchenberg, I didn't see how friendly his junk assemblages were. They looked nasty, meant to put you off. But now I can't look at asphalt, or crackled mottled old walls, or stuff like that without feeling their suggestiveness of paintings.

I've even found myself comparing Frank Stella, who really can't draw (some people just don't use it much) favorably against overly intellectual artists with no feeling for form. He found interesting ways of working with simple structures. He had an educated eye, and that's technique too.

I have to agree that art that only makes sense to other artists with similar interests is limited stuff. Ideally you want to do both--be coherent in your conception of art, and relate it back to life in general. It's narrow of artists to make jargony art for each other, but it's also narrow of civilized educated people to expect everything to be effortless and easy to read. Both should expand their own interests along the principles, to see where the other is coming from. I think Ibsen learned his feminism from trying to write about independance for Norway, and following the principles. I think Shakespeare's great pieces state an artistic issue right up front, and stay with it all the way through.

I don't care much for Picasso's big pieces, or many of the cubist pictures, just a few are really full pictures to me. I like that wicker-basket goat at the Picasso museum, the little beach-people paintings, his neglected "Paul McCartney" period in the twenties where all those guys look like Paul McCartney. The pipes of Paul McCartney is a great painting. A silverpoint drawing of Paul McCartney abducting a woman. Two Paul McCartneys reading a letter. I like the earth-boy leading the storm-cloud horse. The girl with basket of flowers where the girl looks like a student pottery vase--I love that one.