SIGMUND FREUD THOUGHT most narcissists were either homosexuals or women. Attractive female narcissists were the “purest and truest feminine type.” “Such women have the greatest fascination for men,” he wrote. According to Freud, infants are total narcissists, because they can’t get inside anybody else’s head. They demand everything and are outraged when it doesn’t arrive. Freud used the phrase “His Majesty the Baby.” (It’s in English in the original.) Parents put up with these demands because they are sad they can no longer make them. They shield their children from the truth: Life is frustrating.

From our current vantage, it’s not hard to acknowledge that one of the presiding spirits of early-twenty-first-century art is Ray Johnson’s. Collagist, painter, poet, and the originator of mail art, Johnson took up the appropriative strategies of Marcel Duchamp and Jasper Johns, infused them with John Cage’s ideas about Zen and chance, and energized the mix with his own brand of deadpan Conceptualism. The art he made beginning in the early 1950s until his death in 1995 purposefully merged artist, artmaking, and art object in ways that were once disquieting but are now considered routine. The

In a somber essay I wrote in 1989 and haven’t reread in twenty-five years, a piece whose heavyhearted title was “Speaking in the Shadow of AIDS,” I concluded: “The motive behind this brief inquiry into AIDS and language has been an attempt, perhaps immodest, to mold words into something stainless. AIDS has made me watch my speech, as if my words were a second, more easily monitored body, less liable than the first to the whimsy of a virus. . . . Bodies have always wanted only one thing, to be aimless: or so I say, knowing that bodies, and always, and aimless, are among the most seductive, and

Not all stars have star presence, and those with star presence don’t always become stars. It’s easier to quantify stardom—through box-office receipts, salary per picture, dressing-room size—than it is to qualify star presence. Richard Dyer, the British scholar who helped establish star studies roughly thirty years ago, helped pin down this elusive, almost ineffable term when he wrote, with bracing simplicity, in 1993, “Stars are things that shine brightly in the darkness.” But even the more useful, concrete descriptors of star presence that Dyer’s formulation points to—luminosity, transcendence—are