A while back, I got to spend a year reading and writing at the New York Public Library, whose glorious Beaux-Arts pile brightens two full blocks of Fifth Avenue. And every day when the library closed, one of my singular pleasures was to leave that wonderful building and, heading up 41st Street to those same two blocks on Eighth, get a look at another of New York’s architectural splendors: The Port Authority Bus Terminal.

From the beginning, some observers—even some Warhol fans; even (sometimes) Warhol himself—have claimed that his durational movies were conceptual works whose essence lay in their premises, not in the experience of seeing them.

In November, I published a New York Times essay headlined “In Praise of Art Forgeries .” Nothing I have written has provoked as strong a reaction— including the response by philosopher Alva Noë in these pages. I have since realized that my article touched such a nerve because it raised issues that seemed to dance around art but which are actually central to it.

I’m so fond of my now-endangered profession as a mass-media art critic that I don’t want to see massive changes to it. I merely want to see its content transformed.