Dear Larry and Hazel:

Here is Text.

I wrote it for a show at a local gallery, but also to sell at booksALIVE 2007!, where I am supposed to have new work at my book-signing table. I don't know whether Adventures in the Underground will be available or not.

I have been thinking about the subject since you invited me to the Passionate Visions show, at the New Orleans Museum of Art, where I first saw Howard Finster's paintings with text in the paintings, and also where we laughed at the descriptions of the paintings, and artists, that accompanied the paintings.

One of the de Goncourts said, "Nothing hears so much silliness as a picture in a museum."

Do you remember the column I wrote where I said the Edvard Munch painting "The Scream" was the painting's response to what people were saying about it?

I didn't just mean museum-goers. I meant art critics. Or whoever wrote the text in the catalog describing the painting, and what its significance was.

Also, one time the editor of The Beachcomber, an entertainment fortnightly--or weekly, or monthly--commissioned me to write an article on a curio shop that sold imports from Mexico, and in the article I wrote a short explanation of what ex-voto painting was--they were the only good pieces in the shop--and the editor wrote in the margins of my copy, "Are these your own words?"

She asked me to revise it.

I said, "No thanks. It was take it or leave it."

That is the problem the artist faces when he tries to bring his work to a wider audience. How does he do that without having the person who is paying for the reproduction of his work interfere with it.

This is a subset of ownership issues.

A free-lancer, you have to give up your copyright to the paper you sell your work to. They own it. They can do whatever they want with it.

Or book publisher, or movie studio.

I found a way around that, at least until they regulate the Internet, in the name of pornography, or copyright protection, or anti-terrorism, by doing it myself. But it limits the number of people I can reach.

It's a crapshoot and a tradeoff, as Laurel Speer says.

Anyhow, see you Saturday. Looking forward to it.

Jack