13 May 2004. Today I went to the local Visual Art Center to look at the pictures selected for the exhibit three of my visual poems were judged insufficiently talented for. It was just as I expected: more representational portaits of palmtrees, pelicans, old fishermen's houses, etc., than non-representational works; a great deal of skilled but uninspired . . . no, that's unfair: most of the pieces were inspired, but none were culture-expandingly inspired. Culture-completing I think I would call the best of them, and there were ten to twenty in that class. I mean by this, works that do nothing new but do what they do excellently, and capture some significant moment or significant angle of a moment never before captured. The only straight photograph I noticed in the exhibit did this: it was of a brilliant red flower of some sort hanging in front of multiple layers of green leaves and darker-colored branches raggedly rimming a just-unsecret way into . . . a meadow, a clearing, just a backyard? Whatever, it'd be an unusual person who would not have wanted to go into it.

Now, there are hundreds, thousands, of photographs and paintings of similar scenes executed the same way, but in this one the flower, the layers, the angle into the wherever seem to me significantly different from all the other such photographs and paintings I've seen, so--for me--the photograph helps complete a part of our culture. My rejected mathemaku, however, expand our culture by adding an entire new room to it--to be filled by my pieces, and those who follow me into the room.

Yes, I'm boasting again, but not with what anyone could call glee. Perhaps if my works got the respect that so many culture-completing works get, it would be easier for me "maturely" to allow that it takes both kinds of artists, and neither is better than the other. Part of me truly believes this. Part of me, however, will always have trouble understanding how other artists, serious artists, can be satisfied filling in rooms others created.