A critic has first to be critical with himself. When writing about art, I think this means bagging all your preconceptions and prejudices as you stand in front of a work. Of course, this is almost super-humanly impossible. That’s because we are all culturally informed and come to a work with our backgrounds of conscious and unconscious likes and dislikes.

So to shake me out of this pre-configured state, part of Unfinished Perfect is devoted to doing activities I don’t like and writing about them. The idea is simple: forcing myself to experience things I think I don’t like  makes me examine the initial prejudice against it more distinctly. From there it’s just an easy step to putting the dislike on hold when confronted with it in the future. Right?

I Don’t Want To… will see me doing stuff like boozing it up in a rented stretch limo on a Friday night, playing golf, biking in exercise classes with soccer moms, cavorting with groups of tourists at the Burj Khalifa, etc. In tried-and-true before/after fashion, I’ll try to look at the prejudice and see what changed. I’m open to suggestions on these activities; the only criteria is that I need to have a pretty strong aversion to it.