ROBERTA SMITH

Thanks to a hacker known as Guccifer who wormed into the computer of the 43rd president's sister, the world has learned that George W. Bush is an amateur - I would say serious amateur - painter.

A certain rough-around-the-edges improvisational looseness - a sense of something coming together before your eyes, or not quite - may be one of the things that distinguishes performance art from theater.

I am a noncook, although I'm very interested and have a large collection of cookbooks.

Performa's founder and prime mover, Roselee Goldberg, has great instincts for which artists might collaborate well together.

The obsessions of others are opaque to the unobsessed, and thus easy to mock. NASCAR, jazz, baseball, roses, poetry, quilts, fishing. If we're lucky, we all have at least one.

You never know when contemporary art is going to insinuate itself into a normally art-free zone.

Thanks to a hacker known as Guccifer who wormed into the computer of the 43rd president's sister, the world has learned that George W. Bush is an amateur - I would say serious amateur - painter.

I am a noncook, although I'm very interested and have a large collection of cookbooks.

Performa's founder and prime mover, Roselee Goldberg, has great instincts for which artists might collaborate well together.

The obsessions of others are opaque to the unobsessed, and thus easy to mock. NASCAR, jazz, baseball, roses, poetry, quilts, fishing. If we're lucky, we all have at least one.

A certain rough-around-the-edges improvisational looseness - a sense of something coming together before your eyes, or not quite - may be one of the things that distinguishes performance art from theater.

You never know when contemporary art is going to insinuate itself into a normally art-free zone.