These are the notes which accompany the article found here:
The article text was too long for the Huffington Post blogging platform to accommodate the notes as well, so I have posted them here.
As long as I am laying all my cards on the table, let me clarify my feelings about Jerry Saltz. I understand these have been the subject of a certain amount of curiosity, especially given the almost inhumanly friendly tone of my response to his very rude comment about my drawing. To set the record straight, of course the comment hurt my feelings and made me angry. And of course the article was calibrated to be so friendly as to be a bit of a needling. I did, however, sincerely hope that he would take me up on my offer of life drawing together. Where there is room to persuade, I will always seek to persuade. Like those of you who read it, I thought his reply to the article was exactly what it appeared to be: sloppy, mean-spirited and intellectually dishonest.
On the other hand, whatever any of us on the Post-Contemporary side object to about how he thinks or writes, it's worth remembering that he, fairly uniquely, makes himself available to consider and respond. That's not true of a lot of people broadly aligned with his perspective in the critical establishment, whom we do not rail against, because they do not look at us, and we do not read them - but their opinions hold as much weight as his, or more, and they meet us with silence. How many critics at Artforum can you name, and describe the outlook of?
I will repeat something I have often said before: I learn from reading Jerry, and I believe that he has a strong eye, especially for work within his critical bailiwick.
However, there are things I have always wanted as an artist from him as a critic, and which I have gotten in person, but which I will never get in public. I have been on the critic end of such relationships, and it is extraordinarily irritating. So it is not only for my own moral and emotional health, but also for Jerry's sake, that I do my best to think very little about him and to seek nothing from him. This was my policy before his unsolicited remarks on my drawing, and it remains my policy. I have had the good fortune to get most of what I wanted from him, from other people, and though I might have liked to have received some of it from him, he does not have it to give. I play a very small part in his life, and would prefer that what part I do play not be that of the pest.
8 I draw inspiration here from God's superficially perplexing justification for his command to Israel in Leviticus 19:34 (and elsewhere):
"But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt."
Now the Jews were enslaved in Egypt. So what is perplexing here is surely this - we instinctively seek the Christian justification from the moral principle of reciprocity, Luke 6:31's "Do to others as you would have them do to you."
Failing this, we would expect some kind of symmetry, a cosmic notion of debt:
"Thou shalt treat a stranger well; for you were treated well when you were strangers in [X]."
But the God of Exodus turns to neither of these concepts. He says:
"Thou shalt treat a stranger well; because you suffered when you were strangers."
He says:
"You know what it's like."
This is an empirical formulation. It is pre-moral, invoking not the concepts of right and wrong, but the psychological mechanism of empathy. It is on this foundation that morality is built.
This demonstrates several things.
First, it is a good illustration of the pragmatic quality of Judaism. Judaism will usually opt for the concrete and empirical over the abstract and analytic. Judaism is rooted in the world of things, not the kingdom of ideas; it rises into the kingdom of ideas, but it starts and ends in the life of human beings in the world.
Second, it is a good illustration of how religion does one of its primary jobs, which is to build human beings. Here Judaism draws the mechanism of empathy out of its founding narrative, to explain and emphasize the necessity of empathy to its followers. The human being Judaism seeks to build is an empathetic human being.