Too Close For Comfort

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Artists, writers and poets, musicians, actors (especially actors!), scientists, professional athletes, pretty much anyone and everyone we dub as ‘famous’: the less I know about you, the better. I don’t want or need to know anything about your personal life, no matter how colorful and/or fascinating and/or inspiring and/or deliciously sordid your life might be. All I care about is what you do, your work. You, as a person and as a thing, stand between me and what you do, your work. You are a distraction.

And yet I couldn’t stop myself from reading this piece on Chuck Close in The New York Times Magazine this morning. Everything I don’t like to read, don’t want to read, and don’t need to know. But I couldn’t stop reading. Snobby elitist sensationalist NYC art scene fact-gossip masquerading as journalism. Shame on me.

Some great photographs, though.

Photograph: Christopher Anderson/Magnum, for The New York Times