66%

In 1998 I graduated from Elam and cruised into my late twenties more concerned with men and liquor. I knew that my video art wasn’t saleable. I couldn’t make the leap into the dealer circuit and the art reviews I’d been writing began to nibble at my psyche like piranhas.

People wanted me to write about art. (Their art.) I became a butler, opening the door for other people’s talent. I felt like Jeeves. It did not occur to me that Jeeves occupied a position of power. I had gone to Elam to be an artist, but at twenty-seven years old – the age when Jim Morrison died in a Parisian bathtub, already a bloated, washed-up hack from riding the storm of his own success – I was merely writing about other people’s art. I felt like a nobody. We are all nobody to someone, but to be nobody to yourself is something else.