Peter Schjeldahl

Gerhard Richter is reported to have said, “I wish more people would like art, but they don’t.” Do you agree with Richter, and if so, do you have any ideas about what we can do to work on that reality?
Fred Heffner
Kutztown, Penn.

If too many more people liked art, I could never get near what I want to look at in museums except with a gun. I’m not unhappy that art—meaning art of historically remote or experimental contemporary sorts, because everybody likes some kind of art—is a minority enthusiasm. It is bound to remain so, in any case, because cultivating a taste for art requires luxuries of proximity (to major museums and galleries) and of leisure time, as well as personal initiative, which are unevenly present in any society. I do wish that expense were not a factor and that American museums had free admission, as most European museums do. But art lovers—like balletomanes, say, or jazz aficionados—will always be a gang of the eccentrically impassioned. An élite? Sure, keeping in mind that in a democracy anyone gets to be an élitist.

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I want to change this reality. I am so happy to be part of an elite. Sincerely, Yes I accept my elitism. But I believe if it is good enough. It doesn't matter. Like my previous reference Michael Jackson. With luck, talent, and hard work can make the impossible possible. I want to be beyond demographics. To be beyond faith. To be beyond everything that divides us. To appeal to the very aspect of being human. To capture what it means to be human in a fleeting and temporal method understanding that it is neither a definition nor a question but a statement. Not so much a truth. But something less tangible but simultaneously more. Like the Bach Cello suites. Both Glorious and Humble. Triumphant in our lack of superhumanity. We are the most magnificent paradox. I want to communicate this. In the greatest of ways. I am not a philosopher. I am artist. I care about how you feel. " How does it feel? To be so alone with no direction home."