A sly article in today's New York magazine by Christopher Mason pretty much encapsulates the entire art market..."It's kind of gross, but it's really cool." It's the really cool idea we have to worry about. Morals like ideology are something from a halcyonic age of Grand naivete that expired around 1975.

I received a copy of a fifty years of the Zabriskie Gallery, an icon of something or other. Suspending all disbelief and opening my mind to The Possibility, I still could not think of what I saw on those pages as for the very most part dull and talentless productions.

Clement Greenberg memorabilia in Katonah (that's where it belongs). This man with his way for words and articulateness conned generations of people into buying ridiculous paintings. Only Pollack's celestial suggestions are worth anything. I remember the impact seeing one upclose on a wall in a small apartment on East Lake Shore (Ruth Horwich's?) --WOW.

Greenberg knew towards the end that DeKooning was a phony but by that time could not reverse himself much.

The main reason The Gates is misunderstood is because today, in the year 2005, we have lost the practice of regarding art as an object of contemplation. That is the only dimension worth its weight in gold. Now we replace it with art an an object of desire.

From the Cave through Christianity contemplation of the certainty of death was the primary justification for art. Then Came Commerce!

I need to find a single reason why I should spend one more iota of time thinking about art. The hothouse of the 19th century mind had too great a hold over my undergraduate years when Howard Mumford Jones and Helen B. White tried to create aesthetes of us all. It was a different era, one that has becoming increasingly irrelevant with the onslaught of movies and the media.

Read several copies of The Week for the first time; so superficial: whoever said Harold Evans was a great mind. I always feel sad for these deracine Englishmen. Lower Manhattan is full of them lurking around Soho House, or munching tartines at Pastis.

One of the saddest sights I ever saw was Bill Clinton at Ossie Davis's funeral, emotionally stating that the character actor "could have" or was it "should have" been President of the United States. He is delusional.

Yesterday I went to see The Gates and there is no need to voice another opinion. They are what they are -- colorful pieces of fabric blowing in the wind against the changing sky. My only reservation is that there are too many of them and it gets monotonous in a Warholian way. What is curious is Richard Meier's rhapsodic encomiums about the installation.

I forgot to mention a letter by Tom Hayden that appeared in December in NYTimes Book Review criticizing the fatuous Christopher Hitchen's "analysis" of Port Huron. The Vanity Fair contributor misrepresented this important historical pronouncement so he could,Taki-like, appear cute as an intellectual button.

The Christos are about to effloresce. We will withhold judgment until we view the flying rags. Well at least they are not wrapping the whole park obscuring it from view, which was always a possibility.

A bright little light: the impending marriage of Charles and Camilla. And don't ask why I care! I see old phony Butler Jephson pretending to like Diana when his book was the single greatest portait of her snobbery and narcissism. He did more damage than all the other writers put together.

I am willing to accept the possibility that It Is Just Me in this miniscule spiritual struggle against the UBS show at MoMA. I mean the NYTimes reviewer is not livid about it, but RESPECTFUL. I still think it is mainly garbage.

More importantly we are definitely in the era of a New McCarthyism; a hapless throwback to the 60s Professor is interviewed by a dope like Paula Zahn squinting so she might appear more intelligent, reading off the questions of the management, grilling him for speaking what mind he has.....chilling.

It is almost painful to read Ann Temkin's preface to the UBS Collection monster catalogue; surely she cannot sleep nights believing what she writes. Or maybe she is just a parrot repeating stock phrases signifying, when you actually look at the collection, almost nothing. The Guston is execrable and the DeKooning, where the charade starts, meaningless yet she manages some tortured paragraphs about ..oh never mind.

The media talking again about that repulsive Ayn Rand whose Vitalist philosophy so entre deux guerres; most of her generation really believed in a proto-Nazi concept of powerful superior beings. Wagnerian morons. Dangerous people.

So that I would not be part of the Age of Mechanical Repro Syndrome I walked this morning to 53rd for the press preview of the UBS Collection, to see those same paintings reproduced in every magazine, touting the munificence of the corporate donor. The Corporate Assembler of this collection, a Donald Marron gave a nonsensical talk and my first thought was "Guilty!".