Raised mostly in Montana, with some years in California beach towns, I’d had contact with fine art, but 99 percent of it was slides or printed reproductions. I told myself this was fine: reproductions were tidy, and slides tiny reliquaries, uncorrupted and jewel-like. In many ways, ideal. I was wrong. What I discovered as a grad student in New York was the necessary and exhausting emotion of confronting art itself. The messy, sexy, physically unnerving shock of the real. That paintings can seduce you, sicken you, haunt you.
