Simon is a big man and affably British. He began with an excoriation: what does a contemporary art event feel like? Alot of vanity, spectacle, and ultra-capitalism, signifying what? These shows and fairs, they’re samey sterile bland internationalist monuments to an aspirational high-culture drenched in gossip and money, full of talk about talk and the excitement of large amounts of money changing hands.

Contemporary art feels like bullshit!

But then he pivoted into an hour or so of experimental philosophy — category-5 brainstorming! — on an exploratory mission to find the value in it all, or at least some of it, as the (exemplary) films of Philippe Parreno played in the background. Afterwards I heard someone describe what Simon was doing as “riffing” and that seems exactly right. A flood of assertions and intellectual constructions assembled hastily, considered briefly and then left behind in the wash. The man has a mind for structures, reductive models, beautiful systems: tightening loops, infinite matrixes, chains of action and reaction, flipped symmetries in time…

Always earnestly. “Does that mean anything? I don’t know I just said it!”

A thread through all of it that I latched on to: the idea that we have these art objects and art experiences — and then there is all of this stuff around it — theories, histories, personalities, markets, institutions — and you can’t have one without the other. These relationships are destructive when they overwhelm the art — separate from it or overtake it in some vital way, but are healthy when they contribute to “a drawing out” that is honest to “the thing in itself.” Good art makes us think and feel more about the world around us, and good theory makes us think and feel more about the art.

I thought alot about Chuck Klosterman. Something about fireflies? Twenty minutes of nodding my head, smugly, followed by sixty spent desperately trying to stay afloat.