To the Editor:

When I first saw images of Simon Doonan’s Barneys words, I certainly would have thought he’d at least glanced at Jack Pierson’s work at some point. But one needs to take Mr. Doonan at his word [“How Did I Become the Typhoid Mary of the Art World?”, Simon Says, April 17]. So, assuming he’s being honest about not knowing Mr. Pierson’s work, I find myself in basic agreement with him concerning his ethical position. Even if he were consciously using Pierson tropes, the ethics wouldn’t be clear. (Maybe Randy Cohen should sort this out.)

I am a member of the “art world,” and I would like to add something by way of defense of Mr. Pierson’s position. In art schools and in smaller art worlds, it’s considered really, really bad form for big fish to steal from little fish, for teachers to appropriate students’ ideas, for locally famous artists to swipe stuff from unknowns. Mr. Pierson seems to have internalized this ethic and carried it to the bigger stage on which he operates. I’m assuming that he’s not staging a publicity stunt.

A few years ago, I felt a little queasy when watching The Cell and seeing so much contemporary art directly quoted, without attribution. I wrote a piece for Time Out, but briefly here is how I summarized the problem:

“We’re used to seeing some thinly disguised version of this month’s gallery exhibition in next month’s fashion magazine, but it’s more startling to see the same strategy in a summer blockbuster. An unspoken art world ethic—increasingly antiquated and often violated—finds it unfair for artists with higher visibility to steal (or ‘borrow,’ if we subscribe to Picasso’s famous quotation) from those with lower visibility. And it is this ethic that gives me pause given the discrepancy in sizes of art vs. movie audiences. On the other hand, artists have never been shy about culling source material from more dominant media (especially film), this is the Age of Sampling, and none of the artists whose work is referenced in The Cell are hurting in the fame and fortune department.”

Mr. Doonan is probably tired of all of this. He knows all of the arguments. But I thought I’d add two more cents.

Dike Blair

Manhattan

To the Editor:

I enjoyed Mr. Doonan’s “Typhoid Mary” piece on the objet trouvé wars of collateral attribution: delightful and perfect. He managed to hoist the collective pretension of Chelsea without benefit of fulcrum or lever, using only the pinky of equanimity. Archimedes himself would have been impressed. I hope his courageous sensibility is as contagious as it is outrageous. Thanks for the fresh air.

Frank Burt

Houston

To the Editor:

Mr. Doonan is a class act. I’m now on the hunt for the salvaged letters F and U. Once found, I’ll hang them, in an artful way, on my designer-white walls. Then I’ll take a picture and send it to Mr. Pierson. I look forward to his cease-and-desist letter.

Jade Seto

Toronto, Canada

To the Editor:

I remember some of the great window displays that Mr. Doonan did during my time at the Barneys penthouse (circa the early 90’s), which screamed Arcimboldo by way of Dalí by way of Warhol. In such a ready-made world, I sure hope Jack and John appreciate the wit in your fine riposte.

Christopher Olberding

Manhattan

Find Me … a Good Movie

To the Editor:

First, let me thank Rex Reed and Andrew Sarris for the consistently high quality of writing that they contribute to each week’s issue of The New York Observer. While I do not always agree with their positions, the manner in which they are presented is always entertaining and informative.

Mr. Reed’s March 27, 2006, column [“Mobster Circus,” On the Town] effusively praising the new Sidney Lumet film Find Me Guilty first brought this film to my attention. Mr. Sarris’ equally enthusiastic column on the film [“Diesel Does Criminal Comedy in Lumet’s Latest Masterpiece,” At the Movies] in the following week’s issue sealed the matter: This was a film I had to see.

So perhaps you can understand my bewilderment today when Find Me Guilty was nowhere to be found in Manhattan’s movie houses, or anywhere else in the New York metropolitan area, less than four weeks following its initial release. I suppose that I should have moved more quickly, but really—how is it possible for a film of this quality to slip so rapidly beneath the waves?

As I write this letter, the film is playing in only four theaters nationwide—two in California and two in North Carolina. While I know that the film will eventually be available on DVD, I still find it a bit depressing that a quality film can so quickly be written off by the distributors and the public at large, especially in Manhattan. An incident like this reinforces the worst trends in modern moviegoing—i.e., the focus on event and blockbuster movies shown on multiple screens for a brief period, while smaller films are not allowed time or space to find an audience. Apparently, the reasoning is that such an audience may be “found” more affordably during its home release. Even if true, such reasoning does nothing to address the loss of the moviegoing experience (the good parts, of course, and not the sticky floors and cell phones).

Anyway, I thought that I would bring this “quick hook” to your attention, while thanking Mr. Reed and Mr. Sarris for bringing the film to mine. Now to find another movie for tonight, and await the eventual Find Me Guilty DVD.

Charles P. Guarino

Old Bridge, N.J.

I’m not really surprised. It was inevitable; I could see it coming. Helen Keller could have seen it coming.

Let’s go back. Way back.

The year is 1978: I am living in a garage/loft space in downtown L.A. at the intersection of Pico and Figueroa. Somehow I’m subsisting on the $100 per week I receive for decorating the windows at a store called Maxfield Blue. This is a hip, groovy designer boutique located right next to the Troubadour in West Hollywood. My mandate is to change the windows every week and make them cheeky and subversive. The prop budget? Spend as little as possible.

In no time, I have discovered the joys of the L.A. wrecking yards. Here I find incredible treasures: everything from old toilets (Marcel Duchamp!) to factory lighting (Dan Flavin!) and discarded sign letters from movie houses and dry cleaners (Jack Pierson! But let’s not get ahead of ourselves). These often-filthy found objects provide a surreal juxtaposition to the Yohjis and Montanas and Muglers I am charged with displaying. I’m not quite sure why it works, but it does.

1986: Eight years and over 400 window installations later, I relocate to New York and take a job dressing windows at Barneys. My first question to the display-studio manager upon arrival? “Where are the junkyards?”

Over the next 20 years, I continue to use all manner of found objects, particularly signage. Signage, signage, signage. Whether on the store interior or in the windows, signage is hugely integral to display. If inspiration fails me on any given week, I find I can always render the name of the featured designer in an unorthodox way: Armani in pasta or Alaia in French baguettes, or Dries Van Noten in rusty, mismatched found signage. Nail it to a plain white wall, shove a few mannequins in front of it et voilà!

1997: I wander into the now-notorious Sensation show at the Royal Academy in London and am taken aback by what art has become: The sight gags, found-object installations and assemblages before me scream “WINDOW DISPLAY.” Artists would appear to have put down their brushes and picked up staple guns and glue guns. The Basquiats, Schnabels and Scharfs of the 1980’s have been replaced by the Damien Hirsts and Chapman Brothers of the 90’s. (The latter duo actually use window mannequins in their work.) Art is obviously having a love affair with display. Will the affair end in tears? Keep reading.

An art-world friend informs me that detractors have dubbed this strange new development “the post-skill” movement. I find this very amusing and strangely accurate. Virtually every artist in the Sensation show is working in a medium that I have blithely and unthinkingly used at some point or another.

“Does this mean that what I have been doing for all these years with such relentless velocity and frequency is art?” I asked myself as I admired a strange sculpture made out of pantyhose, which recalled a window I did many years before when I found a huge cache of dead-stock knee-highs. A haunting thought occurred to me: Maybe one day one of these artist/window dressers will actually accuse me of copying him.

Enter Jack Pierson.

Suddenly last summer, I get a call from Mr. Pierson. I have a glancing familiarity with Jack’s boy photographs, but couldn’t pick one out of a line-up. (I should point out at this point that, though my knowledge of fashion is encyclopedic, I am sketchy when it comes to contemporary art. Years of being a window dresser have made me a populist. I like my art to be clear, communicative and to have people in it. I own a Cindy Sherman, but only because she reminds me of my lobotomized grandmother. With the exception of one photography show (Inez and Vinoodh Matadin at the Matthew Marks Gallery), I have never been to a Chelsea opening and have never attended Art Basel. My favorite living artist is LeRoy Neiman: I would love to own one of his sketches of pimps and hookers.)

Jack politely asks me to “take down those displays in your Co-op stores.” Further questioning reveals that he is referring to the words “COURAGEOUS,” “OUTRAGEOUS” and “CONTAGIOUS,” rendered in found lettering, which appear in all the Barneys Co-op stores. He claims that these installations constitute copies of his work.

I explain to Jack that the lettering has been culled from a vast collection of junk signage that has accumulated in the Barneys display studio. Some letters pre-date even me. Some were purchased at the flea market and on eBay. The words themselves are a brand statement about the Co-op, and the inspiration to display them in mismatched found lettering (as opposed to vinyl or paint) came not from Jack’s oeuvre, but from the mismatched lettering in the Co-op packaging and tissue paper, designed by Work-in-Progress, a design studio on Crosby Street.

I then tell him—and this is the part that went over like a lead-filled colostomy bag—that I am not familiar with his signage pieces.

This last bit of information was met with complete disbelief by Mr. Pierson. He cannot countenance the fact that neither I nor my colleague who installed the display have any knowledge of his signage sculptures. I try to appease him by telling him that I am constantly meeting people who live in New York and have never heard of Barneys and—worse still—people who have zero awareness of me, my work, my three books, my Observer column or my endless America’s Next Top Model appearances. I tell him that people are very busy and distracted and not to take it personally, and to remember that art—his milieu—is now competing with an enormous amount of other cultural clutter, not the least of which are celebrity and SHOPPING.

None of this seems to go over very well at all. It is clearly not what Jack wants to hear. I surmise that what he actually wants me to say is more along the lines of the following: “Yes, Jack, we will support your desire to maintain a worldwide monopoly on the use of found lettering. Quickly, come to our studio and take all these letters away before we use them to spell out ‘MOTHER’S DAY’ (yet again!). Even though I have been using this stuff for decades—as have millions of other people—I will cede to you because you are an Artist, and Artists are more important than mere window dressers.” For reasons too obvious to state, I did not say this.

Jack then sends me a package of images of his found-signage sculptures. They are attractive and chic; if I were a wealthy art patron, I would definitely buy one and hang it over my escritoire. “Great minds think alike,” I muse with a certain satisfaction.

I call him up to thank him for the postcards. I concede that now, having seen these images, I can clearly see how, when he walks into the Barneys Co-op and looks at our hastily assembled words, he sees his oeuvre. I suggest to him that his challenge now lies in accepting the idea that, conversely, when I look at his postcards, all I can see is the Barneys Co-op. This doesn’t go over well either.

The Barneys legal department sends Mr. Pierson a letter clarifying our position and confirming that we would not be removing the pieces and were under no legal obligation to do so. No more is heard. I travel to Florida at Christmas and encounter one of Jack’s pieces installed in the entryway of a friend’s West Palm Beach bungalow. The word reads “CLOSER.” I make a mental note to ask Jack what this means.

Fast-forward to this year, March 25: I’m checking my e-mails on a bracing spring Saturday afternoon. Up pops an invite to Jack’s upcoming show at the Cheim & Read gallery in Chelsea, sent by John Cheim himself. The new show would appear to consist of found images of Jackie O. The unexpected invitation is accompanied, as is so much of today’s art, by a long explanation of what it all means. This missive is immediately followed by the most hostile e-mail I have ever received. It comes from Mr. Cheim himself and should really have been written in mismatched type—à la poison pen, à la ransom note, à la … Jack Pierson.

Denouncing both my employer and me, this e-mail is cc’d to an extensive list of fancy-pants New Yorkers, everyone from Philippe de Montebello to “Ingrid Sichy” ( sic).

Mr. Cheim follows this with a communication sent to the press and subsequently picked up by the Daily News, New York magazine and Time Out. Indignation sputters. Suddenly I am persona non grata in the art world, a shadowy Dr. Strangelove figure whose lack of shame, imagination and talent is being chewed over by the most glamorous people in Manhattan. E-mails and phone calls castigate me for “plagiarizing and insulting a living artist.” A few brave souls leap to my defense, one suggesting that Jack Pierson’s desire for a monopoly was the equivalent of Marcel Duchamp trying to sue a urinal company.

Underlying the whole debacle is the horribly flawed idea that artists are somehow at the apex of our society. According to this ridiculous thinking, artists are somehow innately superior to us window dressers, or to coffee-shop waitresses and strip-club fluffers. Being an artist is not just a job or vocation, but something holy and infinitely worthy. In this topsy-turvy retarded world, the option to place a monopoly on a found object would automatically fall to an artist over a window dresser. Should that window dresser bump into an artist prowling the same wrecking yard, he should quietly step aside so that the artist can have first pick. For reasons too obvious to state, this idea does not go over well with me.

The personal insults directed at me by John Cheim are jarring and unworthy of either himself or the artist he represents, but they will eventually be forgiven and forgotten. What I will never forgive is the implication that Barneys is or has ever been unsupportive to the art community. Barneys has always supported artists—from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the smelly to the fragrant—financially, consistently, unimpeachably, and does so to this very day. To imply anything to the contrary is outrageous, possibly contagious and definitely not courageous.

As this storm in a junkyard dissipates and farts off into the ether, it is hard to see a downside for Mr. Pierson. He and his gallery are raking in an extraordinary amount of money for these nifty sculptures. I applaud this. As a capitalist, I say ka-ching! Good luck to you, Jack! Since those found letters sell on eBay and at the flea market for an average of $12, your profit margins are better than anything we are able to achieve at Barneys.

If you are wealthy, support the arts and buy one of Jack’s hip assemblages. If you are not, then make your own. Do what Rhoda did on The Mary Tyler Moore Show: buy your own initial and hang it on your wall. If you have bigger walls, why not spell out a longer phrase, à la Jeopardy? How about “EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES”?

PS: Dear Jack and John, if all you wanted was a bit of publicity for Jack’s show, you had only to ask. Here goes: The new Jack Pierson show will run through May 6 at Cheim & Read, 547 West 25th Street, and is entitled Melancholia Passing into Madness. You would be insane to miss it.

I’m not really surprised. It was inevitable; I could see it coming. Helen Keller could have seen it coming.

Let’s go back. Way back.

The year is 1978: I am living in a garage/loft space in downtown L.A. at the intersection of Pico and Figueroa. Somehow I’m subsisting on the $100 per week I receive for decorating the windows at a store called Maxfield Blue. This is a hip, groovy designer boutique located right next to the Troubadour in West Hollywood. My mandate is to change the windows every week and make them cheeky and subversive. The prop budget? Spend as little as possible.

In no time, I have discovered the joys of the L.A. wrecking yards. Here I find incredible treasures: everything from old toilets (Marcel Duchamp!) to factory lighting (Dan Flavin!) and discarded sign letters from movie houses and dry cleaners (Jack Pierson! But let’s not get ahead of ourselves). These often-filthy found objects provide a surreal juxtaposition to the Yohjis and Montanas and Muglers I am charged with displaying. I’m not quite sure why it works, but it does.

1986: Eight years and over 400 window installations later, I relocate to New York and take a job dressing windows at Barneys. My first question to the display-studio manager upon arrival? “Where are the junkyards?”

Over the next 20 years, I continue to use all manner of found objects, particularly signage. Signage, signage, signage. Whether on the store interior or in the windows, signage is hugely integral to display. If inspiration fails me on any given week, I find I can always render the name of the featured designer in an unorthodox way: Armani in pasta or Alaia in French baguettes, or Dries Van Noten in rusty, mismatched found signage. Nail it to a plain white wall, shove a few mannequins in front of it et voilà!

1997: I wander into the now-notorious Sensation show at the Royal Academy in London and am taken aback by what art has become: The sight gags, found-object installations and assemblages before me scream “WINDOW DISPLAY.” Artists would appear to have put down their brushes and picked up staple guns and glue guns. The Basquiats, Schnabels and Scharfs of the 1980’s have been replaced by the Damien Hirsts and Chapman Brothers of the 90’s. (The latter duo actually use window mannequins in their work.) Art is obviously having a love affair with display. Will the affair end in tears? Keep reading.

An art-world friend informs me that detractors have dubbed this strange new development “the post-skill” movement. I find this very amusing and strangely accurate. Virtually every artist in the Sensation show is working in a medium that I have blithely and unthinkingly used at some point or another.

“Does this mean that what I have been doing for all these years with such relentless velocity and frequency is art?” I asked myself as I admired a strange sculpture made out of pantyhose, which recalled a window I did many years before when I found a huge cache of dead-stock knee-highs. A haunting thought occurred to me: Maybe one day one of these artist/window dressers will actually accuse me of copying him.

Enter Jack Pierson.

Suddenly last summer, I get a call from Mr. Pierson. I have a glancing familiarity with Jack’s boy photographs, but couldn’t pick one out of a line-up. (I should point out at this point that, though my knowledge of fashion is encyclopedic, I am sketchy when it comes to contemporary art. Years of being a window dresser have made me a populist. I like my art to be clear, communicative and to have people in it. I own a Cindy Sherman, but only because she reminds me of my lobotomized grandmother. With the exception of one photography show (Inez and Vinoodh Matadin at the Matthew Marks Gallery), I have never been to a Chelsea opening and have never attended Art Basel. My favorite living artist is LeRoy Neiman: I would love to own one of his sketches of pimps and hookers.)

Jack politely asks me to “take down those displays in your Co-op stores.” Further questioning reveals that he is referring to the words “COURAGEOUS,” “OUTRAGEOUS” and “CONTAGIOUS,” rendered in found lettering, which appear in all the Barneys Co-op stores. He claims that these installations constitute copies of his work.

I explain to Jack that the lettering has been culled from a vast collection of junk signage that has accumulated in the Barneys display studio. Some letters pre-date even me. Some were purchased at the flea market and on eBay. The words themselves are a brand statement about the Co-op, and the inspiration to display them in mismatched found lettering (as opposed to vinyl or paint) came not from Jack’s oeuvre, but from the mismatched lettering in the Co-op packaging and tissue paper, designed by Work-in-Progress, a design studio on Crosby Street.

I then tell him—and this is the part that went over like a lead-filled colostomy bag—that I am not familiar with his signage pieces.

This last bit of information was met with complete disbelief by Mr. Pierson. He cannot countenance the fact that neither I nor my colleague who installed the display have any knowledge of his signage sculptures. I try to appease him by telling him that I am constantly meeting people who live in New York and have never heard of Barneys and—worse still—people who have zero awareness of me, my work, my three books, my Observer column or my endless America’s Next Top Model appearances. I tell him that people are very busy and distracted and not to take it personally, and to remember that art—his milieu—is now competing with an enormous amount of other cultural clutter, not the least of which are celebrity and SHOPPING.

None of this seems to go over very well at all. It is clearly not what Jack wants to hear. I surmise that what he actually wants me to say is more along the lines of the following: “Yes, Jack, we will support your desire to maintain a worldwide monopoly on the use of found lettering. Quickly, come to our studio and take all these letters away before we use them to spell out ‘MOTHER’S DAY’ (yet again!). Even though I have been using this stuff for decades—as have millions of other people—I will cede to you because you are an Artist, and Artists are more important than mere window dressers.” For reasons too obvious to state, I did not say this.

Jack then sends me a package of images of his found-signage sculptures. They are attractive and chic; if I were a wealthy art patron, I would definitely buy one and hang it over my escritoire. “Great minds think alike,” I muse with a certain satisfaction.

I call him up to thank him for the postcards. I concede that now, having seen these images, I can clearly see how, when he walks into the Barneys Co-op and looks at our hastily assembled words, he sees his oeuvre. I suggest to him that his challenge now lies in accepting the idea that, conversely, when I look at his postcards, all I can see is the Barneys Co-op. This doesn’t go over well either.

The Barneys legal department sends Mr. Pierson a letter clarifying our position and confirming that we would not be removing the pieces and were under no legal obligation to do so. No more is heard. I travel to Florida at Christmas and encounter one of Jack’s pieces installed in the entryway of a friend’s West Palm Beach bungalow. The word reads “CLOSER.” I make a mental note to ask Jack what this means.

Fast-forward to this year, March 25: I’m checking my e-mails on a bracing spring Saturday afternoon. Up pops an invite to Jack’s upcoming show at the Cheim & Read gallery in Chelsea, sent by John Cheim himself. The new show would appear to consist of found images of Jackie O. The unexpected invitation is accompanied, as is so much of today’s art, by a long explanation of what it all means. This missive is immediately followed by the most hostile e-mail I have ever received. It comes from Mr. Cheim himself and should really have been written in mismatched type—à la poison pen, à la ransom note, à la … Jack Pierson.

Denouncing both my employer and me, this e-mail is cc’d to an extensive list of fancy-pants New Yorkers, everyone from Philippe de Montebello to “Ingrid Sichy” (sic).

Mr. Cheim follows this with a communication sent to the press and subsequently picked up by the Daily News, New York magazine and Time Out. Indignation sputters. Suddenly I am persona non grata in the art world, a shadowy Dr. Strangelove figure whose lack of shame, imagination and talent is being chewed over by the most glamorous people in Manhattan. E-mails and phone calls castigate me for “plagiarizing and insulting a living artist.” A few brave souls leap to my defense, one suggesting that Jack Pierson’s desire for a monopoly was the equivalent of Marcel Duchamp trying to sue a urinal company.

Underlying the whole debacle is the horribly flawed idea that artists are somehow at the apex of our society. According to this ridiculous thinking, artists are somehow innately superior to us window dressers, or to coffee-shop waitresses and strip-club fluffers. Being an artist is not just a job or vocation, but something holy and infinitely worthy. In this topsy-turvy retarded world, the option to place a monopoly on a found object would automatically fall to an artist over a window dresser. Should that window dresser bump into an artist prowling the same wrecking yard, he should quietly step aside so that the artist can have first pick. For reasons too obvious to state, this idea does not go over well with me.

The personal insults directed at me by John Cheim are jarring and unworthy of either himself or the artist he represents, but they will eventually be forgiven and forgotten. What I will never forgive is the implication that Barneys is or has ever been unsupportive to the art community. Barneys has always supported artists—from the sublime to the ridiculous, from the smelly to the fragrant—financially, consistently, unimpeachably, and does so to this very day. To imply anything to the contrary is outrageous, possibly contagious and definitely not courageous.

As this storm in a junkyard dissipates and farts off into the ether, it is hard to see a downside for Mr. Pierson. He and his gallery are raking in an extraordinary amount of money for these nifty sculptures. I applaud this. As a capitalist, I say ka-ching! Good luck to you, Jack! Since those found letters sell on eBay and at the flea market for an average of $12, your profit margins are better than anything we are able to achieve at Barneys.

If you are wealthy, support the arts and buy one of Jack’s hip assemblages. If you are not, then make your own. Do what Rhoda did on The Mary Tyler Moore Show: buy your own initial and hang it on your wall. If you have bigger walls, why not spell out a longer phrase, à la Jeopardy? How about “EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES”?

PS: Dear Jack and John, if all you wanted was a bit of publicity for Jack’s show, you had only to ask. Here goes: The new Jack Pierson show will run through May 6 at Cheim & Read, 547 West 25th Street, and is entitled Melancholia Passing into Madness. You would be insane to miss it.