Really cute moment.

Yesterday as I was trying to keep myself awake after a night of fitful sleep, and putting an old friend on a plane in the wee hours, an elderly lady came into the gallery. She was very nice and asked to see a catalogue of Michele Oka Doner's work, which she had never heard of before she saw a picture on my desk.

She took the catalogue aside and looked at it for a while, then up at me and said, "This is the most exciting thing I've seen in a long time!"

She was very earnest about it. Not being annoying or asking dumb questions or demanding information out of me. Just really, really excited and nice. She got herself into kind of a tizzy, then took a press release and set off into the bowels of the gallery to look around. "I'm supposed to be on my way to a hospital," she told me. "But this comes first. Art is far more vital to life."

What an entrancing lady! I hope she comes back. If we had more people come into the gallery who were as excited and in love with ART itself, I might really enjoy my job. As it is most of our visitors are just gawkers who seem not to feel anything when they look at the work, or stuck-up art snobs who only want to know about technique, or rich people dripping with money and privelege (although I've seen fewer of them over the past few months).

It's sad to see people's reactions - or lack thereof - to art sometimes. Granted, the gallery IS a commercial venture, and if you aren't planning to purchase anything here (ie, if you don't have a few hundred grand at least to throw around) then we can't do much for you on a practical level. But the art is here to be bought and sold only on a very superficial level. Art, as Oscar Wilde put it more eloquently, is "quite useless, practically speaking." But art is really HERE to be experienced. To be entered into with the naivety of a child, with the innocence of... well, an innocent. It is here to awe you and take you someplace where you don't think about money and commerce anymore. And of course not all of it will. There this hideous Jesus Rafael Soto piece in the vitrine right in front of me that makes me puzzled and mildly unhappy to look at, for instance. But why come to an art gallery with an agenda? Why badger the receptionist for information she doesn't have, or look dour, or drag your kid around by its hand? I much prefer, and better understand, people who come in wide-eyed and stand for hours and stare.