Humans are first and foremost attracted to the patterns we see in life because of their beauty. Only afterwards do we discover their utility. What supreme irony, then, lies in what inevitably happens next: The more we use the patterns we discover, the more we lose our awareness of the beauty that attracted us to them in the first place.

The Trixie Telemetry company is a case in point. I’d never heard of the thing until this morning, when I was drinking my morning coffee and read about it in an online article in The New York Times. In “Are Metrics Blinding Our Perception?” we learn that the Trixie Telemetry company sells a program to help parents raise their babies by quantifying their little lives, and turning what they do into data. Parents use the program to keep...

Some women love pornography, but I'm not one of them. Porn's nature seems to me to satisfy men's needs, and not the needs of women. (Admittedly, this deserves its own discussion, which isn't going to happen here.) I’ve already owned up publicly, in previous posts, to being a prude and proud of it, so for those who might be offended by people who don't love porn, I suggest you not read what follows.

Whenever I see porn -- which isn’t very often, mind you, unless I happen to, pardon the expression, bump into it, it strikes me as ridiculous. I respond this way whether I encounter the high-art porn of Robert Mapplethorpe, his face turned around to leer slyly at the viewer, all the while with a bullwhip up his butt, or the low art porn of bored actors grinding methodically away on the Robin Byrd Show. Porn is a feeble, worn-out form of sex. Porn actors always seem...

Decades ago, the sculptor Carl Andre remarked that Andy Warhol, King of Pop Art, was “the perfect glass and mirror of his age and certainly the artist we deserved.” With Warhol’s iconic painting 200 One Dollar Bills selling for $43.7 -illion at last night’s Sotheby auction, not a thing has changed: Warhol remains our perfect glass and mirror and continues to be the artist we deserve. The painting, which sold to some anonymous rich collector or other, is one of Warhol’s first silkscreen paintings consisting of a grid of 200 of our almighty greenbacks, arranged in an oh-so-perfect modernist grid.

Warhol’s art, simultaneously a critique and a celebration of consumer society, brought the attitudes and accoutrements of modern mass culture out onto the...

In an article in yesterday’s Washington Post, Blake Gopnik reports that revisionist thinking in art history is that all those nudes in Western art are actually about sex. Stupid me. Here I was, bopping along, thinking they were about rutabagas.

For example, take Titian’s reclining Venus d’Urbino -- a lovely, buck-naked lady whose eyes gaze straight out at us while her hand perches tantalizingly on top of her crotch. For years, art historians have held forth on why that picture is Art with a capital “A,” and not Sex with a capital “S.” Erotic, yes, but overtly sexual? No. And art history students, eager to pass their art history exams, have obligingly written reams of essays parroting their...

Who are all these Americans who so love their health insurance that they’ll go to Washington to demonstrate against a government plan to offer health insurance to those who don’t have any health insurance? You know, the ones who utter such sentences as, “I love my health insurance plan,” and “Get the government bureaucrats off my back.” People who “love” their health insurance plans? How is that? Because it’s “freedom of choice,” they say. I have a name for people who dig in their “live-free-or-die” heels in order to prevent a government “takeover” of health care: the “I’ve got mine” crowd.

The news last evening reported that the “I’ve got mine” crowd cheered Representative Michelle Bachman and House GOP leader John Boehner. Boehner stood at a podium...

I have a drawing exhibition opening tonight. Like most artists facing an opening, I feel a mix of excitement and dread. What if I walk in the room and all the drawings have been framed upside down? What if I suddenly hate all of them? What if this, and what if that? “I’m thrilled” plays ball in my head with “Let’s just get this over with.”

Actors and musicians have openings all the time. They have their first opening night, which must be particularly nerve-racking, but after that, surely they get used to the butterflies. Performance art of any kind requires this strength, at the very least. Besides, performance artists thrive off the applause of their audiences.

But artists are entirely different. We live in our studios for hours, days, months and even years with no one seeing what we do. We’re not performers. We like a...

Last night I sat around waiting for trick-or-treaters. None came to my door. Not that I was really surprised. In New York, parents generally take their kids in and out of the stores, which offer candy to all the adorably greedy little ones. Even so, I had bought a plump bag of bite-size MilkyWays so I’d be ready. I guess I’ll just have to eat them myself.

Waiting around for trick-or-treaters got me thinking about Halloween, and from there, to ruminating, for the umpteenth time in my life, on religion. Halloween is one of those holidays Christianity appropriated (religions on the rise do well when they take over beliefs already in place and merely modify them to fit their own idea). Yet even though Halloween has become secular (save for Wiccans and the like), its inherent paganism shines through. Set in autumn (the end of the harvest and well into the dying of...

First, thank you to The Chronicle's Brainstorm editors for publishing news about my drawing exhibition. I was both surprised and delighted to see the post!

Here I'd like to tell a little tale about how sometimes big government bureaucrats are the solution.

I first experienced vertical life -- i.e., living in a residence in a tall building rather than living in a one- or two-story house -- when I moved to New York. The first loft my husband and I rented was a third-floor artist’s loft -- a walkup (no elevator) with slanting steps as steep as the flat side of the Matterhorn. At the time, we had a baby, no money, and -- fathom this -- no washer and dryer. (Laundromat days were especially fun.)

Twenty years ago we moved into the fifth-floor loft we now inhabit. This time, the building had an elevator. It was old, and it broke down a lot, but...

In today’s New York Times, there’s an article telling us about how one Ms. Tiffany Block, age 28, landed a $13-an-hour job as an administrative assistant at a truck-driving school in Indiana, beating out almost 500 other applicants. With so many applicants possessing good qualifications, all of them hungry for employment, the company had a difficult task sorting through all the applicants and settling on the precious few whom they would interview. In the end, they selected eight for an interview. Each of the finalists was then subjected to an hour-long, one-on-one interview, consisting of 100 questions.

How did Ms. Block win this job? What led to her success? The article suggests the usual reasons—such as how...

I came of age when the “f-word” first started entering ordinary conversation among educated people. Although The New York Times still won’t print it, The New Yorker will. The word is now so ubiquitous and ordinary that it’s lost most of its shock value. Most of the time, it barely manages to register, let alone make a point. It remains vulgar, but since the educated and the elite of today adore vulgarity, who cares?

In high school during the 1960s, I never heard the f-word said out loud, although I knew it existed, of course. I'm sure I must have heard it whispered at slumber parties -- and even whispered it myself -- although I can’t say I remember any occasions in particular. In the 10th grade, I stumbled across Tropic of Cancer on a bookshelf in my older sister’s room, and devoured it there and then.