The Times weighs in: As it turns out, I'm not Spartacus ... I'm Jean-Luc Godard

Go figure.

On a whim, I've taken the final paragraph of Tony Scott's review of "The Girlfriend Experience" and replaced a few words or phrases with those of my own. They are, in order, "The Girlfriend Experience (2009)" with "The Annotated McCain (2008)"; the entire review except the last paragraph with "Blah, blah, blah..."; "Soderberg" with "Raymond"; "weeks just" with "months"; "10th-anniversary deluxe collectors edition comes around" with "art world catches up with the real world," and "cinematic experience" with "strangely cinematic painting."

The Annotated McCain (2008)

Blah, blah, blah...

Mr. Raymond, like Jean-Luc Godard in the second half of the 1960s, is less concerned here with finish or coherence than with an authentic, on-the-fly recording of a moment, and right now that moment — the months just before the last presidential election, when the financial system was in midcalamity — is at once too close and too emphatically in the past for it to make a lot of sense. But when the turmoil of the last 12 months has receded and the art world catches up with the real world, this strange, numb strangely cinematic painting may seem fresh, shocking and poignant rather than merely and depressingly true.

Wow. I'm honored.

And did I tell you I just sold seven paintings?