
That was my one-man show at the New Gallery of the University of Miami, in 2001, when I was 40. It was the only time I really focused on a body of work and refined my wobble up to that level. The internet attention performance art that I have been doing in the meantime is much more immediate. Paintings take time and a seriously concerted effort, while blogging and message boards are much more click-and-get.
Either way, there is now a certain amount of human awareness energy connected to my stuff. When I was fooling around with quantum mechanics with my buddy Nick Herbert, we talked about a fascinating idea for an experiment: Take two identical artworks. Infuse one of them with an excess of attention; get a lot of people to look at it a long time. Then display both the “pre-seen” piece and the “unseen” piece, while measuring the “popularity” of the two by recording the amount of time the visitors spend looking at each one. The hypothesis predicts a longer attention total for the piece that was “pre-seen”.
We never devised the specifics thoroughly enough to test it. Any suggestions?