In moments that year I thought I saw X relax a little, as if this achievement had really changed her, but I found several pages of handwritten notes picking apart a single essay that the writer Elvia Wilk published in Future Looks Magazine just weeks before the retrospective opened. One line in particular seemed to have driven X mad: “The problem with her oeuvre, which is also a problem with her personas—her oeuvre and personas cannot be dissociated—is that it fights a merciless battle against complicity with the existing culture, against the incomprehension that accompanies each social and professional recognition, beginning with X’s own.”* All her notes amounted to a single question that Wilk raised and X was unable to resolve—could she both disdain the state of this country’s culture as a whole and still reasonably desire or accept its approval?