Now, a quick interview with a famous artist of the day

“...Well, Thurmond Theery was unkind. My work, “String”, the first “String”, was a monumental statement about the inconsequential - or, more perhaps - a translation of the monumentality of the inconsequential - You know, as much as a room full of string can say about such a thing.”

“You speak about a work, “String Three”, this one, a work where you literally string the continents together, literally. How so?”

“Airplane and a big spool of string. Monumental spool of string. Strong stuff.”

“I see.”

“Do you? Really? Can you see it? The string, bakery string, draped hundreds of thousands of miles, over homes and forests, and tigers and little poor children starving to death - no one is absent in my art! - over oceans - give it a yank and draw up an ocean! Magnificent!”

“Theery says you are a buffoon...”

“I wrap time around my finger like one end of a yo-you string and bounce space up and down with a flip of my wrist, Theery can kiss my bank account!”

“Still, he claims that your work is past it’s prime, that you are reaching, that your show has become all showmanship.”

“I filled the Guggenheim with pink ping-pong balls, FILLED IT! Right to the top, do you know there is a chimney, not many people know that...”

“Ah, classic work - ah, you were arrested for littering...”

“At the opening. Who would have thought of it? All those ping-pong balls rolling down Fifth Avenue... We only got the one door open. The only show in the history of the world to be an instant success without a single person entering the museum! And closed before it even opened! Ha! Jail, so what?.”

“And “String Two, a bit racy for the family viewers; the critics say you shouldn’t have.”

“They didn’t have to look if they didn’t want to.”

“You performed it on the steps of the New York Public Library.”

“They could have turned their eyes away.”

“Some say you just don’t have any talent. That you’re just a pervert, a ham, and worse, simply filled with juvenile concepts that are without depth. Bad for the art world, bad for the world in general.”

“Oh, really? Where are these people? In Soho? Are they in Rudies? I don’t think so. I suffer for my art. I spent six years researching my last project by locking myself in five-foot wide fish-tank with a dead otter. You know what that’s like?”

“You did what? Which years?”

“I said I spent two hours staring at a fish-tank while thinking about a dead otter, do you know how hard it is to do that?”

“You just said...”

“Don’t listen to what I say, just watch me! Watch what I do - I can do this, can you do this.”

“Mash my fingers about?”

“See, to you it’s just mashing your fingers about, to me it’s making knots in time! Knots in time!”

“And speaking about time, that’s about all the time we have today. Thank you, Neery Theery, son of esteemed art critic, Thurmond Theery, artist, social critic, and by some accounts, buffoon and idiot of our time. Goodnight!”