The Filfth and the Profundity

Tom Friedman
Untitled (blown-up detail)
1992
feces on a pedestal

Good art is like a good stripper, it flirts and reveals a lot but remains mysterious and evasive. Art provokes the need to possess it, know it, often defile or deface it but its elusive, flexible meaning only heightens its allure. No one wants a whiny, didactic, confessional stripper. And as Waters says, "Transcendence is a great thing, but I don't want it or expect it all the time."