Remembered the comment about this being Picasso's best work. In no way, in my opinion, can it be called even the best of his rose period. I like it very much, but I can't imagine how anyone could think that. There are many others right there more poetic and just as fresh and easy. There's not even much reason to pick a best, out of those, let alone call it his best altogether. I like the rose period stuff--it's nice how he got a full-feeling portrait with a little mottled color and some brash drawing, it makes a lot of more finished stuff look overworked, stodgy, uncertain, and tired.

   The cynical side of critiques. In college a friend of mine and I used to predict and parody things people would say, and play little theoretical pranks. One thing people always said was "this area seems unresolved." My friend did big abstract paintings and got that a lot. But she found a cure. "it's a head" she'd say, and improvise one out of whatever was there--here's the jaw, and see, the neck, whatever. Somehow that solved it. Oh, okay. This became codified as the Give them a head theory.

   Another thing people would say if they had nothing to fault someone on, or more likely didn't care to really think about it, was "I'd like to see this really large." You'd painted it the wrong size. Charles said this once to a kid outside the hipster art clique who was really beginning to get something good going, but Charles seemed to feel the kid wasn't cool enough to be granted this success. I couldn't go along with the high-schooly bitchiness of it, I said "Why don't you just stand a little closer to it"?

   Another theory was Give them a hair, based on a very popular little drawing of mine. It was a softly shaded portrait with a sort of universal, stylized oval head and a single limerant strand of hair. It was just a life drawing of my wife in the tub with her face framed by the water line that I'd simplified quickly, and shaded in later. Everyone liked and talked about it to a point I started to be disgusted with it. So we tested it with my friend's big steel sculptures, by having a little bit of fine wire added as a focal detail. It became all anyone talked about in Kaiti's show. Theory two, Give them a hair.

Maricio Lazanski set up the first graduate school in art in the U.S. in Iowa city, and his powerful "Nazi" drawings did a lot for the idea of drawing as an art of itself, not just a preparation to paint or sculpt. His students spread all over, and it's an influence on art schools in many places. I was in that vein for awhile before I knew much about it, because I didn't paint, just wanted to draw, back then, so I transfered to a school that let me keep drawing without funneling me into painting.

I'm about to rattle on into my own theory of high art, which is a bit formalist and comes as much from literature as anything else.