After the Auction Lights Go

Paris, late evening.

Last night I fell down one of those familiar corridors on YouTube. Art documentaries. Big names. Big rooms. Big numbers spoken with reverence. Auction houses. Dealers. Legends assembled like constellations.

For a while, it’s intoxicating. The scale. The certainty. The implication that this is what a “real” art life looks like.

And then, quietly, something else arrived.

A kind of exhaustion.
Not envy exactly. More like collapse.

Looking back over my own forty-year art life, it suddenly seemed small by those measures. Fragmented. Uneven. No towering auction results. No machinery humming behind my name. Just a long path of making, moving, leaving, returning, beginning again. Years of work carried forward more by devotion than momentum.

I sat with that feeling longer than I expected.

And then a different question surfaced. One that never appears in those films.

How happy were they, really?

How inhabitable was that life from the inside?

What gets edited out when success is framed only through scale, visibility, and spectacle?

The question didn’t arrive with accusation. It arrived gently, almost tenderly. As if asking to restore something human to a story that had grown too polished to breathe.

If someone were to bring a patient camera into my life, and a writer who knew how to listen rather than amplify, gather the work, the places, the seasons, the ruptures, the quiet mornings and the long stretches of uncertainty, it wouldn’t be a small story at all.

It would simply be a lived one.

A man staying with his work across decades. Learning how to remain intact. Learning how to make without disappearing into myth or machinery. Learning how to live a life that can actually be inhabited.

This morning, Paris was unchanged by my late-night reckoning. Light fell across the wall. A cup warmed my hands. Breath arrived without instruction. Nothing dramatic announced itself.

And that was the point.

I’m not waiting for my life to begin.
I’m not postponing myself until some future milestone arrives.
I’m already here.

Alive.
Aware.
Content in ways that don’t require explanation.

Whatever else may or may not come, this part matters. And it counts.

(Feel free to leave a note in the comments. I read them slowly.)

From Paris.
As always.