Look, Ma. I'm famous.

I'm on Page Six! If only my poor sainted mother were still alive. This, of course, would be the entry:

Hot For Maria

MARIA Bartiromo has an artistic follower. Geoffrey Raymond was standing outside Goldman Sachs yesterday exhibiting his new painting depicting CNBC's "Money Honey" as the Virgin Mary, with the quotation above her head: "If I see that bitch Erin Burnett on the 'Today' show one more time, I'm gonna freak out!" Raymond told us, "I think the picture is actually very pro-Bartiromo. Were I she and I saw Burnett popping up on 'Today,' I'd freak out, too. It seems like a very honest emotion. Maria's much hotter than Burnett, in one man's opinion. I'm all-Bartiromo, all the time."

Just a couple of quibbles, if I might:

a: Although I did so willingly, I feel like being drawn into the debate about who's hotter is a fool's errand. It diminishes the majesty of the thing itself.
b: I wish they had thrown a line in about eBay.

Still, to actually be on Page Six is something. This must be how Jasper Johns felt in the early days.

All that aside, and far more to the point, consider this item--also from Page Six:

New Art Era

ART connoisseurs, shocked at prices for contemporary works, figure the rising tide can only make the Old Masters more valuable. Dealer Larry Salander has put a $100 million price tag on a Caravaggio he's showing at the former Forstmann mansion on East 71st Street. He told writer Gregory Speck, "If people can justify paying $90 million for a new work by Damien Hirst, they should consider that these 400-year-old paintings are worth far more from an aesthetic point of view than anything from the contemporary field of junk, in which I think the emperor wears no clothes."

Amen. Let the record show that I skew closer to Caravaggio than to Hirst. I mean, have you seen the way I treat my dark areas? (I'm talking just painting here, not my larger psychic landscape).

In the end, the three guys with the best dark areas (I'm talking just painting here) are Caravaggio, my boy Max Beckmann and your boy, me.

And to carry Larry Salander's argument to the next level: If the Caravaggio is going for 100 large, and the Hirst went for 90 (We're talking millions here), then surely some forward thinking soul, some budding David Rockefeller, the next Gertrude Stein, can see their way clear to squeezing out ten or fifteen large (we're talking thousands here) for Big Maria.

As I type the words "ten or fifteen large," the thought racing through my head goes something like:

From my Mac to God's ears.