I love art fairs and street markets, spending the day wandering from booth to booth, catching photographers, painters, glassblowers, and sculptors arranging their pieces in aesthetic displays, hoping to catch the eye of a spontaneous shopper. I admire artists who choose this venue. It is raw and vulnerable. Anything can happen. Petty words might be tossed around carelessly as if the artist was not within earshot, making the compliments of true admirers all the more valuable.

In addition to street markets, artists have other options. Small galleries, coffee shops, restaurants and even hair salons display art for sale. For the rare few, a weekend exhibit in a prestigious gallery can turn a passion into a career. The Internet explodes with opportunity for artists who build clever websites and take advantage of social networking. Even animals are staking a claim in the world of art – elephants, horses, and dogs.

The doors are open to artists of all species who use a variety of mediums – paint, clay, bronze, glass, charcoal pencil and animation – to create, display and sell their art. We don’t even question the legitimacy of the concept. I would be appalled if a small enclave of people appointed themselves to review and reject or accept each piece submitted by an artist.

Yet that is what we have come to expect of the literary community (I ought to be ashamed of starting that sentence with yet, but I relish the freedom of breaking the rules).

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UPDATE: Video after jump.

Full text of Letterman’s explanation, which will air on tonight’s show:

“All right, here – I’ve been thinking about this situation with Governor Palin and her family now for about a week – it was a week ago tonight, and maybe you know about it, maybe you don’t know about it.  But there was a joke that I told, and I thought I was telling it about the older daughter being at Yankee Stadium. And it was kind of a coarse joke. There’s no getting around it, but I never thought it was anybody other than the older daughter, and before the show, I checked to make sure in fact that she is of legal age, 18. Yeah. But the joke really, in and of itself, can’t be defended. The next day, people are outraged. They’re angry at me because they said, ‘How could you make a lousy joke like that about the 14-year-old girl who was at the ball game?’  And I had, honestly, no idea that the 14-year-old girl, I had no idea that anybody was at the ball game except the governor and I was told at the time she was there with Rudy Giuliani … and I really should have made the joke about Rudy …” (audience applauds) “But I didn’t, and now people are getting angry and they’re saying, ‘Well, how can you say something like that about a 14-year-old girl, and does that make you feel good to make those horrible jokes about a kid who’s completely innocent, minding her own business,’ and, turns out, she was at the ball game. I had no idea she was there. So she’s now at the ball game, and people think that I made the joke about her. And, but still, I’m wondering, ‘Well, what can I do to help people understand that I would never make a joke like this?’ I’ve never made jokes like this as long as we’ve been on the air, 30 long years, and you can’t really be doing jokes like that. And I understand, of course, why people are upset. I would be upset myself. (more…)