I’m SURE my ideas about Schiele are my “dim ego-based perceptions.” As Jiddu Krishnamurti once wrote, “I want to change. I see that I am terribly unhappy, depressed, ugly, violent, with an occasional flash of something other than the mere result of a motive; and I exercise my will to do something about it. I say I must be different, I must drop this habit, that habit; I must think differently; I must act in a different way; I must be more this and less that. One makes a tremendous effort and at the end of it one is still shoddy, depressed, ugly, brutal, without any sense of quality. So one then asks oneself if there is change at all. Can a human being change?”

Instead of change, what do I find? A picky hypercritical demon within that finds voice in invidious comparisons among artworks, distinctions between “good art” and “bad art,” a voice that rants about a curator’s choice to dish up shit and call it ice cream. Yet, if I stop looking at the lesser works of less talented artists, if I have a tendency to suspect a gallery and it’s publicists of attempting to turn straw into gold in the light of day and I can see that they have failed in the attempt, in not speaking up I will have been less true to my own feelings than I would prefer. Neue Gallerie didn’t show much, if anything by Schiele that was not derivative and wrought in mediocrity. That finer work exists I have no doubt, but I saw only a few pieces that day that gave a hint of this. Confused? Re-read this bit from Krishnamurti. Re-read it remembering it really is all about you and not about me at all.

“We must create immediately an atmosphere of freedom so that you can live and find out for yourselves what is true, so that you become intelligent, so that you are able to face the world and understand it, not just conform to it, so that inwardly, deeply, psychologically you are in constant revolt; because it is only those who are in constant revolt that discover what is true, not the man who conforms, who follows some tradition. It is only when you are constantly inquiring, constantly observing, constantly learning, that you find truth.”