Chuck Close was born in Monroe, Washington, in 1940. He was educated at the University of Washington, the Tale University School of Art, and the Akademie der Bildenden Kunste, in Vienna. He has exhibited widely in the United States and around the world since the 1960s, and his painting was the subject of a major retrospective exhibition organized by the Walker An Center in Minneapolis in 1980. He lives in New Tork.

The notion that there is a New York art world, that is, one composed of native New Yorkers—or even long-term residents—is fallacious. A glance at a catalogue from any large group exhibition reveals a tiny proportion of artists born, raised, or for that matter educated in New York. A recent study by the New York Foundation for the Arts (the artists’ grant-giving organization which replaced Creative Artists Program Service as New York State’s major funder of individual artists) shows that sixty-three percent of the grantees have lived in New York State less than twenty years and thirty-eight percent less than ten years. Only thirty-four of last year’s two hundred and twenty-five grantees were born in New York City. An artist had a greater chance of getting a New York Foundation grant if born in Michigan rather than in the Bronx.

If New York doesn’t depend solely on homegrown talent, then what it does is what it has done so well for such a long time—which is to function as a kind of cultural magnet for talent from