Hickey. (Getty Images)

A year ago, on the eve of his retrospective at the Guggenheim, artist Maurizio Cattelan announced his retirement. Recently, another esteemed figure, the cultural critic, curator, professor and one-time art dealer Dave Hickey, called to let The Observer know that he, too, is taking a step back. Mr. Hickey, winner of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and author of numerous catalogue essays, became well known for his 1993 book The Invisible Dragon (in which he, controversially at the time, championed beauty) and 1997's Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy, a collection of his writings on a wide range of topics published in the form of his "Simple Hearts" column in the now-defunct magazine Art Issues. In 2001, he curated the biennial exhibition Site Santa Fe. Most recently a professor of criticism in the department of art and art history at the University of New Mexico, he left teaching last year. In the following interview, conducted by phone from Santa Fe, and via e-mail, he explains his reasons for (partly) retiring, why he's against group shows, contracts and other forms of art-world bureaucracy, why art critics have no power, why art dealing is "the last really honest thing [he's] ever done... the last thing...where you were punished for your mistakes," why artists should join gangs, and what he'll be up to next.

Sarah Douglas: Your writing on art has been influential on a lot of people. Now you're retiring from the art world, at least partly. Why?

Dave Hickey: I’m retiring because my time is up. Last summer I wrote catalogue pieces on Ken Price and John Chamberlain. They were both my friends and my essays turned out to be inadvertent obituaries. I take this as a sign. Also, most writing about art these days is so bad that my secular readership has disappeared. Nobody but professionals and grad students even look at it. So no more e-mails from civilians, no more notes from John Updike or Steve Martin, no more crazy hipsters from Berkeley knocking on my door. Also, the art world has turned nasty for some reason and my gentility has come out of the closet. I cry when people scream at me, unless we’re just haggling about prices.

But you’ll still be writing?

I will be writing, however, revising material for three anthologies and writing another book. The first is a book of essays about the work of women artists because no such book exists. I have about 20 essays about art from Bridget Riley’s to Elizabeth Peyton’s. I wanted to do something for my late friend [New Museum founder] Marcia Tucker, who actually introduced me firsthand to the art world. We agreed on nothing at all so I thought I’d dedicate a book to her about art she would have hated. That would be very Marcia and Dave. I'm also revising a second volume of Air Guitar called Connoisseur of Waves,which is a little more focused on architecture, jazz, movies and surfing. I am writing a book called Pagan America that has grown out of an essay of mine called “American Beauty.”  I also have a completed book of shorter essays called Pirates and Farmers that is light, funny and very mean spirited.

Hmmm...a sort of partial retirement then?

In other words, I plan to disappear like Marcel Duchamp, which is to not quite disappear. I'm about to leave…oops, I haven't left yet but keep on looking. I'm about to leave. I'm giving it all up for chess, that type of thing. I'm actually giving it all up for statistics. My mother was an economics professor. I'm proficient in math, and statistics, game theory, symbolic logic and all of that. I want to write a creative writing book about the statistics of literary prose accompanied by software so you could compare the statistical shape of your writing to that of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Dickens, Ray Carver or David Foster Wallace. My idea is to provide professors a way of teaching creative writing without having to read quires of crap. Also, I really believe that most of the problems with literary prose tend to be statistical. They have to do with sequencing, and the calculus is helpful in gaining this sort of information. When I was in graduate school I invented a grammar based on the paragraph rather than the sentence—very radical at the time. I also had works by writers in three states of revision so I could say: the numbers are like this here, and then here and then here. So I could make empirically based observations about intention. Hemingway means to do this. Gertrude Stein means to do this. D.H. Lawrence means to do this. I was fighting against professorial Freudian and Marxist musings on the artist’s intentions. I hate all that woozy political and psychotherapeutic crap applied to books and art.

In a lecture in Michigan not too long ago, you talked about the problems inherent in art education—that it's not something that can actually be taught. The conundrum of grading, for instance. I think you said that in your class one would earn an A for not turning anything in.

Well, I think artists should be proud and too cool for school. I told my students in my last class that I always had my TA grade their papers. They asked why I didn't read their papers. I asked them how much they would enjoy teaching a swimming class where everybody drowned. So, I'm quitting teaching, too, and saving myself from that sort of desolation. Also, I'm too far away. I'm not competent to critique the work of young artists over whom I have so much leverage and experience. It's like crop dusting with a 747. Bad for the crop and bad for the plane. This doesn’t mean I'm that much better, just that I’m way older. What do you say about a painting or a story by a kid who hasn't seen a million paintings or read a million books? Also, nobody cares if it’s good, anymore, and everybody hates it when something’s really great.

You wrote about bureaucracy in the art world a few years ago in Art in America, specifically about the “knights templar” who “guard the grails of biennials.” This was on the subject of the heated exchange of letters in Artforum between Robert Storr, the Venice Biennale's curator in 2007, and a few of his more vocal critics.

Wasn't that amazing? Until Jerry Saltz's TV show Work of Art, it was the most ludicrous moment in the history of contemporary art.

In one passage you said, "30 years in the art world and hundreds of biennials had not prepared me for the world these texts revealed: the conferences, committees, agendas, proposals, symposia, position papers, tourist boards, prize adjudications, directorial appointments and preening philanthropists." And, "I hated the whole affair for the same reason I hate the Final Four in college basketball: it means too much to its competitors and too little in the larger scheme of things." Is it that kind of pervasive bureaucratic professionalism part of what's driving you away from art?

A few months ago, I sat on a panel about John Chamberlain at the Guggenheim, with Susan Davidson and Donna De Salvo. In the past, Richard Armstrong would have called me and said, "Show up at 5 p.m. We'll pay you." Instead I got a 10-page contract from the Guggenheim that stipulated that my words could be reproduced "in any media that exists and in any media yet to be invented." I read this contract to my students. They all fell out of their chairs. A 10-page contract to sit on a panel! To which nobody came!

Did you like the Chamberlain show?

I thought it was wonderful, all about invention, talent and taste, heavy things imbued with lightness. With regard to biennials, I have a plan. When they make me president, I’m going to ban all group shows. I'm tired of going to dinner and only getting the hors d'oeuvres table—of seeing exhibitions that emphasize the least interesting aspects of the works in the show and demonstrate the vaulting ‘intellectual’ ambition of some preening curator. I want to see a one-person show, or maybe a two-person show. I want some fucking substance, but we can't do that, because we have to be fair, and, as my grandmother said, fair happens once a year, and usually in the country.

I went into the art world because I thought it was private, because I thought it was nice manners with sex and drugs, because if you had a nice living room and dining room and a business card you could run an art business. It was sort of non-visible and I'm best suited to a one-step culture. All these contracts, like the one at the Guggenheim, arise from the fact that we don't know each other anymore. I used to know everyone in the art world. Now I wouldn’t want to, and this has reduced the level of cordiality. It has destroyed the effortlessness of the work I used to do. I've always been solicited and I have only requested one essay in my life, the Ken Price piece, because he was a hero of mine and a dear friend. The experience was a nightmare of bad manners. They treated me as if I'd come in to do the drywall.

This was for the current Ken Price retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art?

Yes. My essay is kind of about how, 50 years later, Ken Price and I discovered that we have all this biographical resonance. We both grew up in Pacific Palisades about three blocks from each other. Our house hung off the cliff overlooking the ocean and Ken’s house hung off the cliff overlooking the polo fields. This was back when Pacific Palisades was a string of nice houses surrounded by humdrum San Fernando Valley LA. Three blocks away there was a 7-11 and the car wash. So there's personal reverie in the essay. Ken and I surfed the same waves and went to the same jazz clubs.

Margo Leavin closed her gallery recently and there was an article in the Los Angeles Times in which her business partner said, “People are approaching art differently today. They’re not seeking out the thoughtful, complete statement that artists make when they create gallery exhibitions. … The exhibitions have been such an important part of what we do, and they are no longer valued as much by the public.” She went on to talk about how important art fairs have become. What are your thoughts on fairs?

I like them for the fashions and the chatter, but nothing is coherent. When I first came to New York, I could look at an artist’s work and tell if they showed at Sidney Janis or Andre Emmrich or Leo Castelli or Allan Stone or wherever. Galleries represented the dealer's taste. Today, even if I go to a good gallery, one I like, like Andrea Rosen, I'm getting a department store. Here's our Iranian Minimalist; here's our Belgian pornographer. And when you compromise your taste, you lose power. When you take advice, you lose power. When a magazine publishes pro and con reviews, they lose power. When a museum shows the art they think they should, they lose power, and the declining power of the collectors, dealers, museums and critics has made it hard to tell the sheep from the goats. The tendency—and I understand it (the same way I understand credit default swaps) is you do what rational actors do. Which, in Larry Gagosian’s case, is to represent a clientele rather than represent artists. Usually a gallery has someone who handles each artist. I called up Gagosian in New York and asked to speak to their Chamberlain person. The lady said, "Are you interested in a large one, or a medium-sized one, or a small one?" I thought, Holy shit! It's not Larry's fault. I have a grudging admiration for him. He’s a rational actor under present circumstances

Do you go to many fairs?

I don't. I've been to Frieze and to Miami a couple of times, some in New York and others here and there, and I actually like them. I like to look at art and to price things. I started out as a dealer and most of my writing is market-driven. I have this old-time notion that there should be some equity between price and value. If I think somebody is underpriced, I try to raise their prices. If I think somebody is overpriced, I try to lower their prices. I don't just go around discovering wonder women in Brooklyn.

This reminds me of your McLaughlin Principle.

Exactly. John McLaughlin was a great painter. How many John McLaughlin paintings is this artwork worth? I started off as an art dealer, and it's the last really honest thing I’ve ever done. It's the last thing I did where you were punished for your mistakes, and the prospect of the gallows will really hold your attention. I regarded Leo Castelli, the Janis brothers and Irving Blum as my mentors. They were the people who told me everything I needed to know. [Castelli Gallery director] Ivan Karp told me things I needed to know that I didn't want to know. But I loved Ivan. He told me how to close a sale, but I still can’t do it. When I asked Leo how he and Ivan worked together, he said, "David, you need a poser and a closer to sell art. I'm the poser, Ivan is the closer."

Who was your closer?

When I ran Reese Palley in New York, it was Betty Cunningham. She was great. In Austin, it was my ex-wife Mary Jane, who was also great. She could say, “Well, if you can’t afford it, you can’t afford it.” And throw up her hands. That’s closing.

In an article about art fairs in Vanity Fair a few years ago, you wrote, "The dealer's only edge is the vanity of wealth."

What I mean is that rich people are confident and often overconfident. This is good for the dealers but good for the collector, too. You always trust your gut. That’s who you are. You see something you like at an art fair, you buy it for cash. Paying things out poisons your relationship to the work. It erodes your trust in your gut. So you negotiate for it, you scream about it, and you buy it. You don't wait around to see if everybody else likes it, that's just going to raise the prices. The best thing about collectors in Las Vegas is those dudes don't care what you like. In Beverly Hills people call all their friends. If you hesitate, if you start to distrust your own taste, you start depending on dealers and art advisors. You’re giving away your power to choose and your power to get good prices. Also, you may be no good at choosing and you should learn that fast.

So what else do you plan to do, besides a creative writing textbook based on statistics?

Well, I look at all these art websites. They tell you how to buy things and give you a bunch of prices. They forget to tell you that art dealing is dealing, not retail. Every price comes out of a deal, so I feel like their numbers need some explanation. So, my friend Joe Tabet and I want to start a limited subscription newsletter called "The Hard Part," which is selling art. We want to educate collectors about buying spontaneously, and how you sell if it turns out that you hate it. This sounds ominous but it’s all about liquidity. It's all about collectors reclaiming their power. Writing “buy” contracts is a part of it. They explain the gallery's obligation with regard to the art they've just sold you. Things that were standard in my days as an art dealer in New York are no longer standard. You can't just take a work back and trade it for something of equal value without a contractual obligation. As a dealer, I always wanted to do that, because I figured if I sold it once I could sell it again. But the art world has changed so radically. Joe, by the way, is an investment banker in Chicago and he has oodles of wonks to churn out numbers, algorithms and curves. He can find out how many times your grandmother was indicted.

What's the main change in the art world, to your mind?

The main change, which people haven't noticed, is that there's no middle class anymore—there's a courtier class, that would be you and me. We’re intellectual headwaiters to very rich people. As a consequence, compared to the disposable income of contemporary collectors, art is cheaper than it ever has been. A purchase that would mean a lot to a nice couple on the West Side would be nothing to these people. Also collectors don’t understand the geometry of price elevation in art, especially in historical art. That means they flip the art too soon, which screws up the market. That means they don't take care of it. That means it doesn’t matter to them, period. I always wanted to sell artworks for enough money that the collector would walk by it and think, "$40,000!—and look at it!" I always hoped that there would be some kind of transubstantiation from money-value to art-value. Anyway, the general principle is, you buy what you love and you can sell what you love. Every time you take advice, you become somebody's minion. Most of the rich people I know have 10 brokers. They don't trust just one guy. So, you can ask 20 people what you should buy. Or, you buy what you love.

So a lot of collections are the product of an advisor's or dealer's taste?

Yes, certainly, and also, most of the good collectors I know have a penchant. Steve Wynn loves painterly paintings, and that goes from Titian to Pollock. He likes wet paint. My friend [Fontainebleau Resorts CEO] Glenn Schaeffer collects Minimalist art, so when the curve on Sol LeWitt dropped compared to his contemporaries, he bought. I think that's how you gain power. You want notoriety so you get the offers. You want power so you get the deal.

How about auctions? If you're interested in numbers and statistics you must also be looking at auction prices…

I do, of course. I even auction things. Good art sells although the business model is sublimely bogus. Lately there's been a fashion for covert chandelier bidding, in which five collectors who own the work of a certain artist throw in $50,000 each and bid a work by that artist up to a higher price. They bid against one another to get it up to the price they have collectively assembled. This raises the price of what they already have. Then they sell it. So, you can't take the auction market too seriously. I have a very good, longtime friend who didn't become a famous artist until he was in his forties. That means for 20 years he was selling art cheap. Now his art is very expensive. Now everybody who bought the cheap art is dumping it on the market and he is competing against himself. Remember when Charles Saatchi bought all those Bruce Naumans? Then he dumped them all on the auction market. Bruce ended up with a warehouse full of his own work because he was out there competing against his own work that had a better provenance. If you don't know how to read the curves, the price means nothing. Take two equal rising curves. One means the artist is moving up. The other means people are dumping the work as fast as they can. It helps to be able to distinguish one curve from the other.

As you mentioned, two artists that you wrote a lot about and counted as friends died recently, Ken Price and John Chamberlain. What happens to an artist's work on the market when they die, in your experience?

There are rules that apply to artists who die, like Ken Price. When Ken was really sick, Matthew Marks just stopped selling his work. I got five calls from vultures in Santa Fe who wanted to buy mine. My principle, which I don’t always observe, is that if an artist dies, you don't sell if for four years. Because when an artist dies, everybody who bought the work because the artist had some connection to them dumps it. When Bobby Rauschenberg died, everybody in Naples, Florida, who bought one because Bob lived right down the coast, dumped it. You get all this postmortem trash in the market.

What about art critics? Do they have any place in this system anymore? They used to have an influence over whether people bought things or not. Do they still have that?

We have no power at all. We just market aphorisms. This is mostly because of magazine economics. Good critics are expensive. I am expensive. Academics work for free to get tenure, and, since they are worried about the approval of their colleagues, they are fearful of making value judgments. Also, most of my peers and contemporaries learned how to write magazine journalism. We know how to do a transition, we know how to do a lead, we know what a hook is, and we’re literate. Most critics today come out of art academia, where they don't even understand the future-imperfect tense. People like me, the late Bob Hughes, Chris Knight, Peter Plagens, Jerry Saltz and Peter Schjeldahl—we're sort of like sewing machine repairmen after the sewing machine has gone out of fashion. All my friends have fancy magazine or newspaper gigs, however, and Jerry has developed a new sort of Chautauqua gig on the side, but Jerry likes people. I don’t, and publishers don’t like me. I’ve interviewed for a couple of these jobs. Publishers take one look at me and think trouble, so I’m just out here by myself, which is fine because they’re right. I am trouble.

What do you miss about the art world of old?

I miss being an elitist and not having to talk to idiots. When I went into the art world there were 6,000 people who were there voluntarily, who didn't get benefits, retirement or medical. We were all just freelance adventurers and we used to hang out. I loved the talk. The handicapping. There were no “professors” and nobody had a job, so we made up jobs. Rolf Ricke and I used to tell people we were art dealers, in Kassel and Austin, for Christ’s sake. Then people started asking us for things, so we eventually became art dealers just because you had to tell people you did something. The end of the world for me—and I'm being serious—is that I've seen dealers, magazines, collectors, critics and museums abandon their own reckless taste for security and money and give their power away. As a result there is power scattered on the ground in the art world. At the same time, I have to emphasize that I think the art is great. There's as much good art out there now as there was in—maybe not in 1968—but certainly there’s as much good art as there was in 1978 or 1988. The difference? The art world used to let in gangs—the Pop gang, the Minimalist gang—and now they let artists in one at a time and isolate them from their peers. This is bad medicine So, if you’re an artist, join a gang. Make up signs. Demand respect, but don’t drive-by critics. It’s our job to hurt you. Sorry about that.

From the second season of "Work of Art."

It was a lively atmosphere on the 16th floor penthouse of the artsy Roger Smith hotel in midtown last Wednesday. Some 30 people had crammed into a small library and tucked themselves in behind white tablecloths to sip bourbon and watch the giant TV that had been set up at the front of the room. There were artists and art critics and, crucially, bingo. They were there to mock the TV show Work of Art during its second season premiere, or possibly celebrate it. With such an event, it’s hard to tell.

The bingo sheets described various outlandish things that might happen during the episode, and you’d check them off as they happened in real time, hoping to score a row. The scenarios were specific enough that you knew the staff had to have seen a screener beforehand, but it was still slightly unbelievable that all of these absurdities would come to pass in a single episode. One or two seemed reasonable, but “Someone uses a power tool,” “The deaf artist’s sign language translator makes it into the shot,” and “Jerry Saltz rolls his eyes at Mary Ellen Mark”?

The first “bingo” was declared 10 minutes into the show.

“I don’t own a television,” said Danika Druttman, who works for the hotel and organized the event. “The thing is, I’ve seen the English version with Charles Saatchi on airplanes and it was fun!”-—she referred to School of Saatchi, which aired in the U.K. in 2009—“but the art world was a bit snobby about it, like, ‘We’re so above this.’ Then here, the American version, it I feel like it got a better reception.”

Her assessment would seem sound. The Times concluded in their initial review, that “Work of Art works,” and the near-constant coverage on art blogs made the phrase “world-famous Brooklyn museum” seem a little less derision-worthy, or perhaps like a self-fulfilling prophecy. After asking The Observer whether or not Mr. Saltz, New York magazine’s art critic, was still on the show, the critic and MFA professor Dave Hickey offered another explanation for the positive press of the first season.

“Jerry’s going to lose all of his friends on this one,” he said, laughing. “Because all the critics I know in New York were being nice to him in the hopes that they would get to be one of the next critics on the show! People in New York place a high value on being on TV and getting to meet Steve Martin and things like that,” he chuckled. “It’s a sick fucking culture.”

Grab your helmets! Work of Art is back. And now that it’s something of an institution, will it ever win the art world’s hearts and minds, or are we just entering the next phase of a long war of attrition?

“I hate the show sometimes, too,” Mr. Saltz told WNYC last week, pre-empting the requisite wave of bile. “I do think that sometimes people need to get a grip, however. This isn’t a billionaire collector flying a millionaire artist to Venice to party down on a private yacht. This isn’t a billion dollars spent at auction for pieces of drivel. I think that the show may be a light thing when heavy things are happening, but I don’t think it’s destructive.”

If the show relied on people like Mr. Saltz and guest judges like Ms. Marks to grant it legitimacy, in its second season it has a momentum of its own. Everyone seems to know what it is—an extended on-camera MFA, with goofier-than-usual assignments, for artists that are possibly talented and definitely attractive. To expect more would be to set oneself up for disappointment. Moreover, its detractors have almost got it out of their system.

“I think I fully exhausted any thoughts on Work of Art,” wrote the artist William Powhida, who has blustered about the show in his work, via email. “Anna Wintour said it best when asked about Kayne West’s recent folly in Paris, ‘Ask someone else.’”

Just as Mr. West’s Twitter postings are now unremarkable no matter how ridiculous they are, there’s something to be said for extremity, and though it’s still early in the second season, Work of Art seems to have embraced its reality TV show status. It’s still early in the season, but the artists participating this year seem to be cut from cloth that is, if not the same as other reality stars,’ at least closer to that cloth than last year’s contestants. The best example here would be the season two contestant the Sucklord—a 42-year-old artist who has sold works at Christie’s and Phillips, and whose work is relatively vital compared to some of the other contestants’ offerings, but again, and this is definitely worth repeating: he calls himself the Sucklord.

“It is true that this season the artists seem to be a little less self-serious,” dealer and judge Bill Powers told The Observer. The Sucklord, he said, challenges biases in the art world in a way they weren’t able to do in the first season. “I think it’s better that he’s on the second season, because we needed to establish what the show is before we could start testing the boundaries of what art can be.”

For the people who decry the absurdity of the challenges and the punishing schedule in which they have to be accomplished, this can only be seen as a good thing. An oil painting based on thrift store tchotchke that has to be done in 12 hours? That’s a bit tricky. Some kind of graffiti-esque drawing on glass that makes no fewer than three people reference Keith Haring? Doable!

Plus, there’s a welcome distance between a working artist and a guy who makes action figures. During the premiere one woman was described at the bottom of the screen as a “figurative painter” and a woman at The Observer’s table—an accomplished, extremely talented figurative painter — bristled noticeably.

People like the Sucklord aren’t just there to test boundaries—they’re accessible, and that accessibility could be another major defense of the show. It offers the audience a glimpse of the art world, an exclusionary, often arcane-seeming place they would never otherwise see or perhaps even have any interest in seeing. Mr. Powers pointed out that Will Cotton’s appearance last season may have served as a compelling introduction to contemporary painting for fans of his Katy Perry album cover.

“When I agreed to do the show,” Simon de Pury told The Observer, “I did it not in any way for the art world, but because I thought this would allow for a wider audience to see what it is to create a work of art, or judge a work of art because there is a kind of misconception or a wrong assumption that art is for a privileged group of insiders.”

You’d think that such a sentiment might win some allies in the art world, like the acerbic critic Charlie Finch, who’s says he’s never seen the show but, when we called him, reminisced about the days when secretaries would head to MoMA on their lunch breaks. Doesn’t the show, on some level, bring us closer to those days?

“It makes art look like a trivial stupid little made-up game instead of the highest form of human creation!” Mr Finch shot back. “Oh yes, that’s really, really great. That will get them going to the museums.”

“It’s like they’re trying to turn art into some TV shit,” Professor Hickey said, adding that it reminded him of something he experienced with the 1960s Raymond Burr detective show Ironside. “It was the first TV show that had hippies on it and we had a party to celebrate the death of hippiedom, because all of a sudden hippies had come to TV. Artists don’t listen to advice, artists are not into being instructed. These kids, they’ve got makeup on!”

Since Work of Art is by no means the first art-based TV show, this accessibility or at least its bid for popularity, would seem to be the most offensive part of the show, for those inclined to be offended by it. Even when it’s entertaining, art on television has a long history of being didactic, from 1969’s Civilisation with Kenneth Clark, to Robert Hughes’s The Shock of the New in 1980, to Sister Wendy Beckett, whose habitted lectures on the Renaissance still grace PBS every now and then. And then, of course, there was the Wild West of cable access, where, in New York in the ’80s, Warhol acolyte Glenn O’Brian hosted his TV Party, a call-in show featuring downtown talent (Warhol himself eventually made his way to MTV) and Jaime Davidovich’s avant-garde The Live! Show behaved as if it didn’t care whether or not anyone was watching. These shows were no more representative of the art world than Work of Art, but then they never claimed to be about finding the “next great artist.”

Aaron Baker, art curator for Playboy and a photographer, turned down an offer from Bravo to audition for a spot last year and this year didn’t return an email asking if he wanted to try this season. He said no television show would ever be able to accurately represent the art world as he’s known it.

“Not the way that we do television,” Mr. Baker said. “But that’s not what it wants to be. Everybody wants it to be Keeping Up With the Kardashians with palette knives, they want it to be cute people involved in silly dramatic scenarios, they want shots of these kids in tighty whites being rousted from bed and dragged to Times Square for a challenge.

“Though I would say that’s a fairly accurate portrayal of art school, actually,” he added.

The way ahead for Work of Art would seem to be the direction in which they are already headed: have the show be nominally about the art world, but not at all for it. Everyone’s going to be watching anyway.

dduray@observer.com