It all began on a day when I least expected it.  My editor forwarded me an e-mail from somebody named Kathe Izzo, about a Valentine's Day performance - no, not a per- formance so much as an installation.  No, it wasn't that, either.  It was about love, in any event, so it seemed appropriate to give it some play for the February issue.  I Googled the artist in vain before sending her an initial e-mail.  As it turned out, the True Love Project she was promoting was to be temporarily housed in a storefront in Hudson, over the Valentine's Day weekend.  Izzo would be there, along with a library of books, tapes, and CDs that she had accumulated, for visitors to peruse at their leisure.  They could talk to her, make their own tape, or perhaps leave a drawing or a few words behind that were pertinent to the subject.  On a certain level, it all just seemed so...redundant.  Just tune into the radio someday - how many love songs are there, anyway?

All this restless desire, an incessant search for perfect love, which in the end (we think) ought to be the perfect reflection of ourselves - it drives all the looking we do all the time.  Watching the endless parade of perfect people on the television, in the movies, plastered on billboards and bus stops, how could I not want to be like them, or want to become them?  (For perhaps I, too, could have my perfect love then, if only....) It seems a matter of pure logic to come to the conclusion that beautiful bodies must be pure, spectral beings projected via streams of excited electrons onto the TV, the computer, on the giant screen suspended over Times Square.

Something about this self-styled "love artist" I was to write about seemed familiar, like there was something I'd already seen or heard about that dealt with something similar.  Something about love, a performance project of some sort.  The memory was so deeply buried that it took the better part of a week to jog it loose.  Then it came to me - yes!  That conceptual artist from New York City, Andrea Fraser!  For several months, everyone had been abuzz about her latest video project, which involved having her dealer solicit a collector to pay $20,000 for a sexual encounter with her in an anonymous hotel room.  The whole thing was videotaped (carefully shielding the identity of the collector), and the tape was then exhibited in the gallery.

Fraser's whole career has been organized around something called "institutional critique," the idea of making art that recursively critiques the economics, the politics, and so on of the contemporary art world and its institutions.  The content of this latest commentary is a bit ambiguous - was it something about the prostitution of artists to the market, only taken literally?  Or maybe that dealers and collectors conspire to screw artists?  Or just that Andrea Fraser must be a fantastically good lay, one worth $20,000?

But maybe I was mistaken in associating Izzo with this scenario.  What she seemed to be talking about in her e-mails, and in a subsequent phone call we had, appeared to be both much more intimate and much less presumptuous than Fraser's ironically distanced, detached, displaced, highly theorized "performance."

Somewhere Marx comments that with the rise of the commodity (for instance, artworks) under capitalism, relationships between people are progressively replaced by relationships between things.  Stepping through the looking glass of celebrity, of public image, of all those excited little electrons bombarding the backside of the television screen, have we not all to some degree transformed ourselves into just such a thing, an utterly exchangeable image?

With all these ideas swirling in my head, I finally met with the love artist for dinner one night, to see a bit for myself what she was all about.  Lately she's focused on individual "true love days" in which she promises that "simply by being the best self I can be and dedicating this true love day to you, completely and with the most opulent, expansive, excruciating, honest, and truly dense and yummy passion, you will have the opportunity to experience true love for perhaps the first time," as she puts in the orientation packet she sends to prospective love dates.

How can she offer such a thing?  Isn't love something mysterious, chemical, hormone-charged?  It strikes like lightning, and about as predictably.  These promises seemed like an enormous scam, save the fact that I really wanted it all to be true.

Over dinner, it struck me that there must be something special in her eyes - or no, was it the way the corners of her mouth turned as she smiled?  - but there was something attentive, appealing, almost irresistible in her presence.  She seemed to have the capacity to turn herself into a divining rod, a tuning fork, or some such sympathetic instrument that picks up and resonates with real human energy.  At first I was almost unnerved by it, and found it easy to believe her story about showing up to the –scope art fair in LA, and setting up 10- to 15-minute "quickie" sessions in a corner of the hotel lobby.  It seemed so promiscuous, almost obscene, to make contact with so many strangers in such an intimate way.

"This is absurd!"  I thought to myself.  "How can she do something like this?"  This last question hung in a random corner of my head, with its unstated appendix - "to me" - hovering alongside it.  Was I actually jealous?  How could this be?

Schooled by an endless stream of pop music ballads and movie love stories, I always secretly hoped to find my "true love" out there, my one-and-only.  Here I find sitting across the table from me the only person I'd ever met who might even come close to fulfilling that fantasy, and she's making artwork out of it!

She sensed it immediately, of course.  But her interest lay not in diverting the anger from herself so much as bringing me to a clear, balanced engagement with it.  "Is it really me that you're angry with?"  she asked, "or some other frustration?"  Wanting, desiring, having, possessing - how bound up we are with objectifying everything (and everyone) around us!

Arriving home in a chaotic welter of thoughts and feelings, I checked my e-mail (another obsessive habit).  I clicked on the last message she'd sent me, several days before.  This time, in the wake of our encounter, her signature line struck me in a new way:

Indeed, if it were not for you,
what would I be?
What is the little I have done,
except to arouse you?
- Walt Whitman