Man!

I just got back from another meeting at the Dallas Museum of Art, and it went really well. (We're in the early stages of setting up a series of film workshops.) I said a lot of stuff about the role of art in the community and art as a response to art and the nature of low budget filmmaking - I don't have the energy to recap it, but it's stuff I am passionate about and believe very deeply. I think I can do something great here, something that will be important to a lot of people - and something I owe to a lot of people. Part of the reason I don't talk about it a lot even though I think about it all the time is that I care about it and it would just take over conversations.

I feel very strange and "I have eaten a lot of candy and nobody has stopped me" each time I go in and talk to the museum people, because they get very excited about the stuff I say that I am excited about, and take lots of notes while I geek out for hours at a time, and want me around even more. On the one hand, this makes perfect sense: these are people who are, like me, very passionate about art and about artists, and who have given their lives to that, and all of us have had moments of awe with pieces in the collection, and all of us find value in extending that awe, and that community of art and artists, as far as we possibly can, with a fervor that is basically religious. Of course they like me very much, for the same reasons I like them so much - we want the same things and speak the same language.

But on the other hand, how can they be so excited? They run The Dallas Museum of Art! Next door on one side are artifacts from King Tut's tomb, and on the other side are installations by Olafur Eliasson, and Magrittes and Mondrians and samurai armor and Winston Churchill's watercolor set just because. And they think I'm pretty exciting! And I myself get excited and say "yes, let us have a high school student base a dance on this Courbet, because there should not be a barrier between that dancer and that Courbet" and we all get more excited about that than the actual Courbet, even though Courbet is the best. What the hell is going on? Why do I get to do these things? I think not everyone gets to do these things, even though what we are saying to each other is roughly "everyone should get to do these things." It is crazy.

Maybe it will be awesome. I think it will be awesome. I think it is pretty bound to be awesome. However, I still can't get over the fact that curators at the DMA - my museum of record - relate to me as an artist, and not as a visitor, and respond to my art and want me to stick around and originate things. (The National Gallery was different because I didn't initiate it - I just got swept along in something cool they were doing.) These are the people who say what is art and who preserve things for the future and whose life's work is about promoting and preserving the transcendent parts of cultures. Being liked by them is not something I can get used to, even though I try to act cool about it, and is weirder for me than getting compliments from Mike Leigh and Jonathan Lethem. It is maybe too much. Possibly I will calm down some once I hear back from festivals and from highfaluting poetry magazines (which I say not with mockery, given that I read and love these magazines), because maybe being accepted by them would normalize things and maybe being rejected by them would deflate things.

But man! What is going on? This is the museum I went to as a kid - the museum where I formed my definitions of art, the special temple of things I love, my ur-symbol of art museums and what belongs in them. I can't say that I'm getting away with stuff, because it seems like a perfect sense good thing to happen. But it is sort of like working at the White House, where most days you think: wait a second. I am working at the White House, and making important national decisions. It is not so big as that. But it is also too much.