Nicely written. At first I was a little irritated by the tone, I kept imagining I was being spoken to by an elderly man who was too addled to realize that I wasnt his 5 year old great nephew or something, but at the end when he was talking about how Maciunas died and the age old proverb of friends and sharing being enough to make life worth holding on to, the tone made perfect sense. Thats a lesson that is so simple, and is so easy to forget no matter how old you are. Dick did kind of lose me with all the "Fancy People" talk (I guess artists back then all had second jobs or something?) That got a little trite the 4th or 5th time around.
I was also struck almost immediately by a sense of rift between our generation and our parent's generation of artists. Now I'm going to generalize, but it seems to me that there was a lot more love back then.... What I'm saying is that in the first paragraph you see the word beautiful, and in the following paragraphs, Dick describes an intent that was focused around exploring the beauty of things simply to relish it... and I can't quite remember the last time I heard of a modern artist going down that road... not to say they don't, but that not many seem to, and this is evidenced in the fact that every time I hear of it happen it is from some artist in my parent's generation or before. It seems to me we are so focused on originality and claiming that last little nugget of undisclosed truth as our own, so concerned with abstraction and ultimately value that we lose sight of simple beauty as a worthy ideal to pursue.
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