When I first went to galleries as a nineteen-year-old snotnose with my high-school surf pal Christopher Williams (he, a painter of Richard Diebenkorn look-alikes at the time; me, doing my best not to completely imitate Richard Tuttle) we used to tear DeKooning labels off the walls of a swank West Hollywood gallery and reapply them to car windows or just bring them home and put them in our notebooks. The prank seemed justified. If Rauschenberg erased DeKooning’s drawing as a gesture of love and aggression the least we could do was remove a sticky title card whose edges were already peeling off the wall. The room was begging for vandals. Moments earlier, the gallery director had told Chris not to touch the art on the wall, to which he responded, but that was how my father told me to look at art. His father was not a bricklayer or a magician but he did blow himself up on the front lawn of the family’s home while experimenting with film effects for Hollywood, so young fatherless Chris became my surrogate-big-brother art coach.

Most of the galleries we visited back then reeked of bourgeois conservatism. They seemed antithetical to the seething impulses that were coursing through our feet, hands, noggins. Artworks spoke to us, they said, revolt, smash, peel labels off walls, and then, prove your own worth, go home and contribute to culture, don’t be a loser. After graduating from CalArts Chris and I started showing at various galleries and I found my way into writing fiction, which lead directly to a friendship with the novelist Dennis Cooper. Upon his encouragement, I began writing for Artforum. Minutes later Chris and I were both teaching at Otis College of Art and Art Center. As kooky fate would have it, Chris began showing at the very same gallery we had earlier vandalized. Showing art, collaborating with other artists, reviewing exhibitions, and publishing fiction in art catalogues put me in a precarious, nearly adversarial relationship with galleries.

As I got older I realized that galleries performed a remarkable service. They did the hellishly impossible: they sold art. And the gallerists, those well-coiffed characters who always seemed more like undertakers or the nervous leaders of a new but not very popular church, kept the walls painted white and the lights turned on. They tried intelligently to hype ideas and objects they were never very familiar with (it’s hard work), they sent out typo-free/grammatically correct press releases that didn’t embarrass themselves or humiliate the artists, and they did it to even scarier people than themselves: collectors and curators. These might have been some of the ...