He also showed a lot of work, such as the series of five buttons ("I can't," "imagine," "ever wanting," "to be," "white") that were among the most memorable pieces of the 1993 Whitney biennale. His work attacking the rich ("In a rich man's house, the only place to spit is in his face") and the powerful has lead to a curious symbiotic relationship. The leaders of the rich and powerful art establishment keep inviting him to participate in their events, thus demonstrating that they're not only rich and powerful, but hip to boot. Still, he tirelessly goes to what he describes as "awful" events like the Whitney and Venice biennales to take advantage of the upper classes.

His message went over well in class-conscious northern England, and not just among the students and art cognoscenti. While Martinez was videotaping in the town market, some of the local lads apparently mistook the working-class artist from the Los Angeles barrios for a rich American tourist. In an act that could have come from one of his street theatre, the locals robbed the rich visitor of his very expensive video camera.

Here's an example. Professor Richard Gregory from the University of Bristol began the day by asking The Question: "Does it demote art to attribute optical effects [such as those produced from Bridget Riley's work] to science rather than more lofty sources? I'm not going to try to answer."

He wouldn't but I will: Yes, absolutely.

Now let's put on our lab coats and examine that anecdote. I am an artist with only a minimal understanding of science in general and the scientific method in particular. Nevertheless I can give a definitive answer to a complex question without giving any proof, citing any precedents, et cetera. Just as something is art because I say it's art, an aesthetic truth is an aesthetic truth because I say so.

You might say I'm wrong. You might be right. But that doesn't matter, because art is about ideas and opinions, not provable facts. And thus is it any wonder men and women who spend their entire lives attempting to prove things are jealous of artists? Tom Stoppard said it best: "What is an artist? For every thousand people there's nine hundred doing the work, ninety doing well, nine doing good, and one lucky bastard who's the artist."

Artist envy was repeated frequently by other speakers. Patrick Cavanagh from Harvard interrupted his facinating presentation on The Art of Perceiving Contour with the observation that "These are things all artists know, but that we scientists have to work out." And artist sitting next to me appeared bored during a presentation by Doctor Andrew Parker from Oxford University. My friend responded to Dr. Parson's diagrams that a subject is illuminated by indirect as well as direct light by jotting "Reflected light illuminates shadows! What a concept!" (In fairness, it should be noted that Dr. Parson went on to cite the example of 19th century photographer Fox Talbot's use of reflectors as a precedent.)

Although the scientists seemed jealous of artists' license to say "It is thus because I say it is thus," the reverse was not true. Professor Heinrich Buumthoff from the Max-Planck-Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany gave an interesting talk about Recognition and Navigation in Virtual Realities. To examine how humans perceive three-dimensional space, graduate students were asked to identify shapes on a computer monitor. The same experiment was repeated on monkeys, who reportedly were more perceptive than the humans. Professor Bülthoff introduced yet another spiffy three-dimensional graph by mentioning almost in passing that his colleagues at Baylor University then "did something they couldn't do with graduate students; they attached electrodes directly to the monkeys' brains."

This apparent "fact" left many of the artists confused. Why can scientists attach electrodes to monkeys and not graduate students? Did the coauthor of some of the research, Shimon Edelman from the Weizmann Institute in Israel feel as comfortable with performing science experiments on living sentient beings? And anyway, hadn't vivisection been widely discredited as a tool of psychological inquiry?