My doubts about conceptual art had been seeded in me during my senior year. Was newness the point of art? Experimentation? Cleverness? Shock? Was it the artist’s duty to rush ahead of humanity and report back from the future? If there was an advance guard, were we at war? Who was the enemy? But my first awareness that faith had abandoned me happened the night of my BFA show. I had left my mother unattended in the crowded exhibition hall to escort the Martins to their daughter’s memorial show. When I returned, I was reeking of their grief. My mother was unaware of my presence. She was studying one of the student artworks—animal organs nailed to a wall in the shape of a lamb. Her face told me what I already knew. If art were a conversation, which I believed it was, this work wasn’t interested in hearing what my mother had to say. This art didn’t care that she had once ridden a streetcar to the museum during a snowstorm to stand in front of Gauguin’s Are You Jealous? and let herself be transported to Tahiti and join in the ongoing conversation (which includes those who have died and those who haven’t yet been born) about who is jealous of whom.