“What’s your favorite organ?” I asked Mary the other day, and she looked at me strangely, as she well might since I’d been reading Chuang Tzu. 

“Favorite organ? Well, if one goes they all go, so I don’t quite know how to answer.” 

“They are many, yet they are one! That’s it. How they do what they do — what, for instance, does the gall bladder do, or the spleen? — may be beyond our ken, so best let them be.”

Yet we were still of a mind not to let O’en be. O’en, who was to be neutered on the morrow, the prospect of which — once she’d described how his operation would differ from the one I had had many years ago — elicited sympathetic pains in what is probably my favorite organ. 

Would this wonderful dog be greatly affected personality-wise? Mary worried about that, lost some sleep over that in fact. Kathy, to whom I always go with such questions, said no, that he might, as a result, become a bit mellower, but that otherwise he would, she reassured me, remain the pre-eminently democratic soul he’d always been, cheerily open and accessible to anything that walks. 

He has been greatly instructive in that regard, especially with me, who, for some reason, is prone to make invidious distinctions rather than simply to let it be.

A few hours after the operation, Mary began to worry anew. “He hasn’t peed,” she said when I came back from work. “God, what have I done? . . . Let it pee.”

Soon after, I reported that all was well, that he had on our walk around the neighborhood left his calling card six times, and seemed ready again to show us The Way.

Manhattan, after the midday downpour that caught me ill prepared and quickly sodden on Saturday, was again humid by midnight, and in Times Square the tourists gaped and the panhandlers pitched and the bridge-and-tunnel roisterers swaggered in roughly equal measure as I made my way back to the hotel from the Port Authority terminal, where M. had boarded a bus for the hours-long journey home. Five years after leaving the big city, it can be a bit disorienting to experience it anew. 

Earlier in the evening, a gentle breeze enveloped us as we walked from a delightful Japanese restaurant on East 11th Street to the Lower East Side to hear the Glazzies, a Sag Harbor band. There, moments recalled memories that, while vivid, seem of a past life, or of someone else’s. While we sat at the tiny bar in the back of the subterranean club as the Glazzies delivered a high-energy set, I remembered a thousand nights hauling guitars, amplifiers, and accessories down the 75 steps and into the taxi, and gazing at the skyline as we crossed the Williamsburg Bridge, and dragging all that gear into the club, and playing for about 45 minutes, sometimes to 10 or 30 of the band’s circle of friends, sometimes to them and many others, and sometimes to the bartender and sound engineer, and drinking a few pints, and rarely getting paid, and hoisting it all back into a taxi and crossing the river again, and dragging it all back up the 75 steps and into the apartment. 

Sometimes those 45 minutes would make it all worthwhile, and a long and merry afterglow would follow, and other times it all seemed pointless and sad, like a sweltering Sunday night in a concrete jungle when you haven’t felt the ocean’s cool, rejuvenating embrace in years. 

But most of that — the best of times, when I was much younger and rock ’n’ roll music still meant a lot to me — happened long ago, in the last years before thousands died in Lower Manhattan as I watched from the roof, 15 more steps above those 75 in that sixth-floor walk-up across the river. 

Has vagrancy exploded since I left New York? Or are the homeless simply more visible now, policy having veered from Rudy Giuliani’s authoritarian extreme to a hands-off, tolerant-to-a-fault of Bill de Blasio’s? Everywhere we went, it seemed, people slept, or sat, expressionless, the fateful events that led to their present condition summarized in written form on a section of cardboard, held or propped against folded knees. Except for the handmade signage it was reminiscent of sweltering nights of Junes past in pollution-choked New Delhi. While I haven’t passed through Delhi since 2010, contemporary New York would also seem to have a decided edge on vagrants who speak, and more often rant, to those that they alone see. 

The West Side, at least, is quite a bit more chaotic than I remember. On a hot and sticky Seventh Avenue, ’round about midnight, packs of drunken bros guffawing as they lurched from one watering hole to the next, the bright lights of Times Square creating an alien, neither-day-nor-night condition, my attention was drawn to a small, middle-aged woman leaning closely into a Link kiosk, the city’s 21st-century answer to the payphone that offers, among other things, a 911 emergency call button. 

Miss, what is the nature of your emergency?

“LISTEN TO ME! I WILL NOT TOLERATE THIS! I AM AN AMERICAN CITIZEN! YOU DON’T ALLOW THIS TO CONTINUE! YOU TICKET THE RESTAURANT! THEY CANNOT HAVE CRIMINAL PEOPLE STANDING THERE SAYING YOU CAN’T USE THE BATHROOM, OKAY? HE HAS TO GET OUT OF THE WAY! FORTY-SECOND STREET AND SEVENTH AVENUE, McDONALD’S, A TALL MAN, ABOUT 6-FOOT-5, VERY SKINNY, THREATENING ME . . . NO, YOU’RE NOT GETTING MY LAST NAME! I’LL DISCONNNECT THIS CALL!” 

Miss, are you there? 

The woman stared into the kiosk, and then shuffled down Seventh Avenue and into the night. 

All of which furthered a gnawing suspicion that civilization is really, finally cracking up. The Great Unraveling is underway — not the economist Paul Krugman’s dissection of corporate and political malfeasance, though these play a part, more Robert D. Kaplan’s 1994 thesis in The Atlantic on “how scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet,” as its subhead posits. 

Amid the noise and the hordes and the endless distractions the air is heavy with fear. Across the land, death by despair is skyrocketing. The embattled president, long accustomed to rule by threat and humiliation, lashes out at his fast-multiplying accusers. The European alliance frays, an ex-K.G.B. spook with expansionist tendencies sows mistrust of the pillars of Western order, and nihilist losers foreign and domestic indiscriminately maim and kill.

Nowhere is safe anymore: not the concert hall in Paris or Manchester, nor Westminster nor London Bridge, nor a Christmas market in Berlin, nor the once-friendly skies, nor the workplace, nor the cinema, nor the suburban baseball field, nor, maybe, the McDonald’s on West 42nd Street. 

I still like being back on the South Fork, and prefer surreptitious forays to living in the city, but increasingly want to hide out, as far from Times Square as one can get, for a long while. 

Christopher Walsh is a senior writer at The Star.

What was it like to be inducted into the Long Island Press Club Hall of Fame? At the Woodbury Country Club last Thursday for dinner and the announcement of many awards, I felt like an elder stateswoman visiting another country. Who were these 200 reporters and newscasters and graphic artists and videographers? When the prizes were given out, I began to find out. About 200 first, second, and third-place awards were presented, one for perhaps every person there, the club’s president told me afterward.

The club was founded years ago by Karl Grossman, as true a journalist as can be, who is now an eminent South Fork columnist and a State University at Old Westbury professor. In those days, Long Island had small, independent weeklies in almost every town and village. Today, chains have absorbed most of them, meaning that they now offer scant local news, or have disappeared altogether. In their place are online journals like Riverhead Local and Patch, although the latter wasn’t represented among the myriad awards. Blogs and podcasts also won prizes, as did social media campaigns and various uses of Twitter and Facebook. The media on Long Island have changed. Nevertheless, despite this, what the club calls narratives were predominant among the awards, and Newsday and News 12 were frequent winners. We sat next to the News 12 table, and enjoyed the collegial spirit when cheers went up for colleagues and strangers.

Jack Graves, our all but legendary sportswriter for decades, introduced me by reading excerpts from a nine-page treatise describing my tenure at The Star, and then I was pleased to say a few words. Jack and I have been rubbing elbows here for 50 years (think of that!) and I was surprised that he had taken such care to whittle his memories into a moving and humorous introductory speech. The whooping and hollering in the room quieted down for us, in respect perhaps for our antiquity or perhaps because many in the younger set were actually interested in hearing about the kind of journalism The Star represents. Is our profession, as we knew it for so long — not just structured but, indeed, made far more rewarding by the high ideals and standards we pledged our allegiance to in newspapering’s glory days — looked at as a curious relic of the past by the young award-winners at surrounding tables? Or do they feel the same sense of purpose and idealism, only with altered rules and standards? I guess time will tell.

Today’s “Connections” is a little shorter than usual. I think some letting up is warranted given that my first “Connections” was published on April 28, 1977. Being able to say I am in a Hall of Fame is swell, but it would please me even more if someone more clever than I, or more patient, would tell me how many columns I have written, so that I could brag about it. I haven’t missed a single week in all that time.

On early, still mornings at this time of the year I often hear the sound of a helicopter near where I live. It is a small chopper, and from its repeated passes, I can tell that it is spreading a mosquito-control pesticide on the salt marshes at Napeague Harbor or at Accabonac.

Quite a number of people I respect, including Biddle Duke, who founded The Star’s East magazine last year, and Kevin McAllister, the former Peconic Baykeeper and the head of Defend H20, an environmental group, say that what the helicopter is doing is far from benign. They say the airborne methoprene used to kill mosquito larvae is having devastating environmental effects.

Suffolk Vector Control, which runs the mosquito program, insists there is no risk at all and laughs at its opponents. The thing is, there is no counting the many times have we heard government tell us that there is no harm from something it is doing only to find out later it was dead wrong.

Why Vector Control is so sure of itself is a bit of a mystery. Longstanding product information about methoprene says it is fatal for frogs and salamanders. It can bioaccumulate in certain fish and is known to be toxic to crustaceans, such as the bottom-of-the-food-chain grass shrimp found in the salt marshes where methoprene is broadcast. Suspicions are that the pesticide may have played a part in the region’s sharp decline in in-shore lobster landings.

Biddle and Kevin are far from alone in their bid to stop methoprene application on marshes. It has been banned in Connecticut for use in coastal areas. The East Hampton Town Board and Town Trustees want it discontinued. State Assemblyman Fred W. Thiele Jr. supports efforts to cut its use. The Perfect Earth Project, based in Springs, is among the stronger voices against it. County officials remains resistant, though there has been discussion of a limited trial ban next year over portions of Accabonac.

The case against methoprene is laid out in a petition at change.org, which, the last time I looked, had about 880 signatures on its way to a 1,000-supporter goal. The actors Gwyneth Paltrow and Alec Baldwin have signed on, as have members of both the local Republican and Democratic political committees. On the fair chance that they are right — and the county is wrong — you might want to sign on as well.

In rehearsing a speech to give on Helen Rattray’s behalf at her induction into the Long Island Press Club’s Hall of Fame, my nerves got the best of me and I began hamming it up. Actually, it was my inner imp that was getting in the way — I was upstaging myself.

“Think of her,” Mary said, pulling me up short. “Stop all the clowning around. Nobody will pay any attention to what you’re saying, they’ll just notice your tics.” She had learned that years ago in a public speaking course. Next to death, her teacher had told her, people are most afraid of public speaking. I am in that number. 

Mary’s advice was, of course, sound. Make ’em laugh — or at least smile — is more or less my metier. Get in and get out. Which perhaps is why I’ve never written anything longer than 500 words. The speech was more than twice that, and I had fallen so in love with my easeful words that I refused to brook any more changes. Still, I was tending to rush at times, Mary said. Think of Helen and slow down. I had written a good speech. It would be all right.

But would it? The crowd at the Woodbury Country Club that night was raucous. Umpteen awards were being handed out and everyone was hooting and hollering. I remember thinking Karl Grossman, the club’s founder, had created a monster. I was hungering for perhaps one more glass of wine, however unpalatable. 

Best Blog, Best Use of Facebook, Best Use of Twitter, Best Social Media Campaign, Best Non-Local News/Feature, Best Non-Local Photo, Best Food and Beverage Narrative, Best Entertainment Narrative, Best Entertainment Video, Best Interactive Presentation. . . . I remember turning to Helen and saying, “We’re dinosaurs!”

Then they said no one speaking that night (Helen was one of three Hall of Fame honorees, Jimmy Breslin and Carl Corry being the others) should exceed five minutes. We’d timed mine at just under nine! Hurriedly, Mary and I began to slash and burn, Xing out, alas, some funny things. And then I was cued to come up. 

The noise level was still pretty high when I began. 

“After Ev Rattray’s funeral 37 years ago, his widow, Helen Rattray, whom you are honoring tonight, took my hand and held it, as if to say, ‘Well, here we go. . . .’ ” 

As I said this — slowly, and looking at her — I could sense that voices had lowered, that people were listening. 

As Mary had said, I could indeed take my time in addressing myself to Helen, whose night it was. In short, I knew I had them.

The message on the iPhone was from my son-in-law, a wildlife biologist who spends his days worrying about biodiversity, habitat, and endangered creatures in the farther reaches of Washington State, and rarely if ever emails or texts  unless I’ve written first, which I had.

“Jeff!!” I messaged him on May 29. “We have sent Julia’s birthday present, which will be delivered on June 1 by FedEx. If at all possible can you please somehow intercept the package and hide it away till June 15? No signature required for delivery so maybe you’ll find it on the porch who knows. XX”

“Consider it done,” he replied.

 It was a big present for a big, round-number birthday — a rose-gold, latest-version, Apple iPad with gigabytes up to here. We’d been puzzling over what to get her, until one day, in the wake of the United Airlines insanity where they physically hauled a man off a full plane for refusing to give up his seat to an airline employee, somebody wrote on Facebook that he’d just cut his Chase/United credit card in half.

I had that same card. I decided at once that I’d do that too. It wasn’t the same as picketing with the crowds in front of Trump Tower, but hey, you get to a Certain Age and you protest where you can.

Here now is what happened. While deleting the card, which I’d had for four or five years, from the computer, United’s “MileagePlus Service Center” page popped up, the first time ever. Lo and behold, I had amassed 110,000 miles! Who knew, who ever even bothers to know, when mileage upgrades, as The New York Times reported on Sunday, are almost unheard of today — a remnant of the distant past, unless you’re an airborne jewel of platinum or diamond status.

Eureka! The “service center” turned out to be a Manhasset Miracle Mile, with page after page of temptations, from a field box to see the Toronto Blue Jays play the Cleveland Indians for 10,000 miles, to, you guessed it, a rose-gold, bells-and-whistles-loaded, Apple iPad for 96,000. Plus tax, it left me with 604 miles that I will never use.

June 1 arrived. “Interception Day!” I texted. “Ball is in your court!”

“I won’t let you down,” he promised.

June 10. “The day approaches. Did the Box arrive?”

“It arrived and was intercepted before she could see it.”

Then, on Monday, Jeff called. He’d opened the brown shipping carton, he said, sounding strangled; removed the Apple box inside, wrapped it up in birthday paper, and left it downstairs atop a pile of other presents — visible from outside through a glass pane in the front door. He was working in the basement when he thought he heard footsteps above, but did not go up to check. 

Did I say the front door was unlocked?

Portland, Ore., where they live, is supposed to be low on the crime scale, but someone had walked into the house and taken the first thing they saw, ignoring everything underneath. He’d called the police, Jeff said, who came and said he was “probably out of luck.” 

It was not a happy day.

Sometime later, Julia, who was at work, got a call from someone in the neighborhood whom she’d never met, asking whether she’d left her house a while before carrying a package, and driven off. 

“No. Why?”

This neighbor said she happened to be looking out her window and saw a woman going from house to house along the block, trying every door. She called her son over, she said, and they watched as the woman slipped inside and left a moment later with the box. Mother and son hurried out, she said, and “stood and stared,” and the thief saw them seeing her, dropped the package, ran to a car, and fled.

At 6 that evening the neighbor appeared at the door and handed over the birthday box. “I was still stunned,” Julia said. 

They gave her a fine bottle of Willamette Valley pinot noir, and are thinking of installing a keypad lock. 

Happy birthday, baby.

Irene Silverman is The Star’s editor at large.

There we were, seven of us, in a circle with prosecco in stemmed glasses and lovely hors d’oeuvres on a table at center. Like-minded people, we were talking about Trump. What else?

It’s easy to go on about the president. Each of us had something to contribute to the conversation, a bit of news the others had not heard or a droll comment. When I asked if anyone had a friend who voted for the president, one of the seven said he had tried without success to talk someone out of it; another said the same about a parent. When I asked if, subsequent to the election, anyone had spoken about national issues with Trump supporters, or made an effort to do so, the “nos” had it. We admitted we lived in a bubble.

The conversation continued, and we all said we had received endless email requests for money for candidates in other states, whom we might not have heard of previously; we agreed that after the election many political and environmental organizations had been persistent in asking us to sign petitions against certain actions emanating from the White House. But my friends looked askance when I described a problem I have with some of these relentless petition drives: It sometimes seems, I said, that we have forgotten that in this country everyone is supposed to be considered innocent until proven guilty. 

Among myriad others, I have been asked, for example, to demand that Jared Kushner lose his security clearance. This proposal and others like it are based on allegations of wrongdoing rather than evidence presented publicly and reviewed impartially. Are we succumbing to something we accuse the president and his cronies of doing — basing our actions on personal bias or emotion? If so, how can we so easily brush aside the president’s claim that Democrats are promoters of falsehood or that the press is biased?

There is, of course, a world of difference between petitioning for the resignation of a presidential appointee who may have broken the law or petitioning for the removal of top federal officials placed in charge of agencies that they had fought and even litigated against before getting the nod from the president. I know enough about Scott Pruitt, the former attorney general of Oklahoma, for example, to want him out, even if he conceded during his Senate confirmation hearing that he didn’t believe climate change was a hoax. 

Half the people I know are jumpy, walking around trying to stay calm, pushing down anxiety that the president will bring on a crisis, perhaps even a nuclear disaster. Six months in, and many federal agencies are understaffed and in increasing dissaray. Six months in, and the shock has worn off. What more can we do than sign petitions, pour drinks, and have world-weary conversations with our fellow bubble-dwellers?

A dark shape flitted past as I headed toward the house after parking my car in the driveway Tuesday night. In the near distance, a whippoorwill was calling, and I assumed the stocky black bird that moved across my vision from left to right was one of them. 

One of the pleasures of living where I do, surrounded by swamp on three sides in Amagansett, is that the underbrush is filled with life. The insects on which whippoorwills feed thrive here, drawing in other birds whose voices are the soundscape from dusk to dawn.

I have written before, and recently, about how much I enjoy hearing the voices of birds, even when I cannot identify them. The whippoorwill makes itself known. It is one of those species that declares its name or seeks a mate or defends its territory with nearly every breath, and seemingly for hours on end. 

Whippoorwills display, at least to me, a pleasing stubbornness. From their calling, it appears that they stake out a perch and hold that spot, declaring their possession to all that might listen. Some years back, one decided that my garbage enclosure, a roughly built low shed, was a proper spot to claim. It was close enough to an open window so that from my bed I could hear what I took to be its buzzing breath between the echoing calls.

With the household unable to get to sleep on Tuesday, I went out with a flashlight to have a look. Two large copper eyes reflected back at me as I waved the beam in the whippoorwill’s direction. It flew off and was silent for a time, but soon returned. I conceded defeat, and did not bother it again.

This week, there seem to be three or four in the neighborhood. They begin their repetitive conversations as night falls. I slip outside, away from the blare of a child’s TV, to listen, having no idea whatsoever what they are really talking about.

Ever trying to reconcile good and evil, I came across in Joseph Campbell’s book on Oriental mythology what Chuang Tzu said when his friends found him drumming and singing after his wife had died. 

Not only nature, but mankind had seasons, he said. Why would we think we could alter the eternal round, what use would it do to wail and lament someone’s death?

“Maybe he just didn’t like his wife,” said Mary.

She’s always injecting reason into my reverie. (And beating me far too many times in backgammon.)

But this is spring, the season for revery as well as revelry. No sooner had the leaves popped than our population did too. “Stay in your backyard,” I said to Russell Bennett on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. “Even better, stay in your backyard for the rest of the summer.”

It was during that weekend that I celebrated some rites of spring. No, no, I made no sacrifice to propitiate the gods as in ancient times — I simply fired up the grill and put on some chicken thighs. It is one of the things I do fairly well now. Mary, who’s witnessed my selective ignorance up close (and my general ignorance too), says she doesn’t even know how to turn the grill on or off. A likely story, but in so demurring she’s helped raise my self-esteem.

And earlier, before firing up the grill, I had immersed myself in the waters of our outdoor shower, toasting the Omphalos in the presence of the leafed-out trees and prehistoric ferns with a small glass of Mud House, it being midday.

“I’m trying to live in gratitude and awe amid the mystery of things,” I said to Mary on emerging. “Shintos do that, you know.”

Whereupon I got my leg (shin . . . toe . . . leg . . . kneed I say more?) pulled. “It’s a mystery you haven’t mowed the lawn,” she said. “I’d be in awe if you did, and you’d earn my gratitude.” 

Naturally, being a Mariolater, I set forth on a quest for the mower, which had overwintered in the shed, tugged on the cord until it turned over — a third rite of spring — and traversed the mossy front lawn, stirring up a lot of pollen as I went. The headiness of spring is not — sneeze, cough — unalloyed. But I try to remember that it’s all one — the beauty, the allergies, the crowds, all the people frantic to relax. Still, you can’t help but be hopeful this time of year. 

It just comes naturally, no matter how much evidence to the contrary there is, here and abroad, and there’s plenty. Still, we live in what East magazine has said is a happy place, so be happy. Well, if not happy, pleasant.

And so I’ve made a note to myself consequently to be pleasant this summer, to be as sunny in disposition as our extraordinary natural surroundings warrant. In fact, the lichen demands it. 

Though it is tempting to just stay in the backyard.

If you wander through New York’s Museum of Modern Art, you’ll eventually come across “Painting Number 2” by Franz Kline, a set of thick, unruly black lines on a white canvas. Elsewhere, you will find one of Mark Rothko’s many untitled works, consisting of various colored rectangles. And in front of both paintings, you will inevitably find visitors wearing an expression that is best interpreted as “I could have done that.”

This commentary on “what is modern art?” surfaced last month at the Springs Mystery Art Sale at Ashawagh Hall — a three-day shopping spree of guesswork at which over 1,000 pieces of art by professionals, students, and dabblers, who had agreed to pit their talents against one another on 5-by-7-inch postcards, are all displayed anonymously, so you’re not sure who made what. It is one of the most clever and enjoyable fund-raisers on the East End. The game — the “mystery” part — is that buyers don’t find out who created their prize until the event closes.

I was amid the acquisitive swarm on the first day of the sale. Despite arriving an hour before the doors were set to open, the red dots I purchased for $20 each had number 53 on them. Some of the 52 ahead of me sat around on beach chairs, chatting. Others sprawled out on the grass with laptops open, working as they waited. Or perhaps they were doing some homework on artists like Charles Waller, April Gornik, and Peter Dayton, who were known to have submitted items this year.

Surely, the idea was to walk in and relish the democratizing power of an anonymous art sale. Buy what you like, as the old adage goes.

Well, I do like April Gornik. I whipped out my phone for a quick refresher. Landscapes. Skies. Stormy clouds. I like Peter Dayton, too. Google said flowers. Colorful stripes. Surfboards.

I wondered if artists ever try to fox the audience, joke with them. Would Peter Dayton submit a macramé dream-catcher instead, that would only catch the eye of a 10-year-old?

By the time the doors opened there must have been a hundred people behind me. Inside, the gallery was a cacophony of miniature art, mostly contemporary, all smudges and blurred lines. Modern art isn’t easy. It is not obvious. You need to be told. This stuff has to be — simply has to be! — better than it looks. I even wondered if the fire extinguisher on the wall was part of the exhibition. I spotted a landscape with big, stormy Gornik-esque clouds. Person number four had already claimed it. I continued to swirl through the room, unable to really focus.

Then something caught my eye. A pair of line drawings on Priority Mail postage labels. One had an old-school cellphone, like those from the late 1990s when they resembled walkie-talkies. Instead of the number pad, there was a face. The other had a surfboard (Peter Dayton: surfboards!). Yes, they were simple enough to be drawn by a child, but then every Gerhard Richter I’ve seen could have been done by a toddler with a squeegee. 

And isn’t modern art supposed to be about communicating ideas? Aren’t artists inveterate cultural borrowers who harvest ideas from the realm of our times? Wasn’t this artist using a visual pun with the telephone to make a statement about device-addiction — literally, our faces in our phones? I convinced myself this had to be the work of a clever artist living in the information age, making art that anyone can decode and respond to.

A docent who could see what I was eyeing whispered over my shoulder, “An artist from London who was just here pointed to those and said they were his favorites.”

An insider tip! I stuck my red dots on the two prints and left as smug as Charles Saatchi the day he discovered a shark swimming in formaldehyde.

David Hickey, long regarded as the enfant terrible of art criticism, once said: “The art world is divided into those people who look at Raphael as if it’s graffiti, and those who look at graffiti as if it’s Raphael, and I prefer the latter.”

Apparently, so do I. 

On revelation day, the Sunday after the event ended, I went to collect my acquisitions. The signatures revealed that two sixth graders from the Springs School were the artists. I tip my hat to Juan Moscoso and Carolina Condon. Their drawings are not simply works of art but works of geniuses. Theirs are pieces of bona fide art that made me question whether art validates the artist or the artist the art. They had got me thinking. And that’s the whole point of art, right?

Judy D’Mello covers education, art, and more for The Star.