About the Author

Looking Around is a web log about art, photography and architecture, produced by someone who is not an artist, not a photographer and not an architect, but who cares about what they do. At one time I considered calling this blog AFansNotes.com, partly as a tribute to Frederick Exley's bleakly funny memoir of the same name, a triumph of exemplary abjection, but mostly as a mission statement.

What I mean to do here is to write about shows or buildings that I haven't had space to cover in Time, or to write about them at greater length, to alert people to things I come across in my reading, and to talk over whatever is happening in the areas I cover. On some of these matters I have well developed views. On others I'm a work in progress. What I won't be reporting on is parties, gallery openings or gossip. If you like to look at drunken strangers on line — and hey, who doesn't? — you already know where to find them. And though it's impossible to write about art without sometimes getting into the topic of the art market, I'm not much interested in who bought what last night for how much. Whatever a work of art may be worth, its dollar value will always be the last way to know.