See, I'd say that both Chris Ware and Joe Frank are pretty huge for what they do -- Ware does New Yorker covers, which has to be the holy grail for any cartoonist. And Joe Frank and Gregory Whitehead are like the only two people in America who have made a career out of making radio plays, and Joe Frank is the famous one. He's definitely one of the only people we've ever played on The Acousmatic Theater Hour that listeners have actually heard of.
But maybe that's just the state we're in now -- the culture in general is fragmenting into little clusters of geeks, and has been for many years now. Although maybe that mythical era in the late 50s/early 60s when the average middle-class American read Saul Bellow and Philip Roth and had opinions about Picasso and Jackson Pollock is just that, a myth.
Anyway, I think the future is pan-geekdom, wherein online communities like this one share their various bodies of knowledge. One area I wish I knew more about was contemporary art, beyond the usual contingent of middlebrow Warholian con men. I went to see an exhibit of non-famous local artists at The Brooklyn Museum of Art a few years ago, and it was 100 times better than sensation, that Damien Hirst thing that got Giuliani so riled up. But I can't remember any of the artists' names. Then when I do get excited by an artist, like Kahinde Wiley, I look up and all the sudden they're doing car ads.
