Kimmelman - eyes wide open:

Art's not fluff. It's not a decorative afterthought or an extra you toss on, like sprinkles. And, as the T-shirt says, art's not something pretty you buy to match your sofa. Art is a necessity. It's a muscular, organic, living, in breathing, complex, life-changing thing that, at its best, makes u us think and feel, causes us to question and cultivates growth.

Art has the ability to make us deeper human beings.

Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic for the New York Times, believes this, and it resounds in every sentence he wrote in his book "The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa," a New York Times bestseller. Kimmelman lectures about the book at the Philharmonic Center for the Arts 10 a.m. Saturday, Feb. 9.

"I really wanted to write a book that spoke to my deeper feelings about art, which is, art had changed my life in various ways," he says from his home in Berlin, Germany. "It made me see the world differently, and understand life more intricately. ...I thought art was something that moved us very deeply and wasn't something superfluous to our life, but deeply meaningful to it."

Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic of the New York Times and author of The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa. Great writers such as Proust and Tolstoy all wrote about art he says, adding, "It was a window to the world. They understood art was integral to life."

In his book's last essay, "The Art of Gum-ball Machines and Other Simple Pleasures," Kimmelman talks about how his five-year-old son would dawdle, writing: "Like all small children, he occupies a state of grace in which everything is new. Children dawdle to look at what adults hurry past. They take time because they have world through fresh e time. They see the eyes. Maybe this is why artists who push us to look more carefully at simple things may also strike a slightly melancholic note. They remind us of a childlike condition of wonderment that we abandoned once we became adults and that we need art to highlight occasionally, if only to recall for us what we have given up."

In the same essay he talks the art of Chardin, Horace Pippin, Pipelly, Ellsworth Kelly and Wayne Thiebaud. Kelly's pictures, he writes, "Tell us that the world full of small miracles [and that] ... these miracles - whether they're squashed pats of butter or fluttering flags - are accessible to all of us, at almost any time, if we are just prepared to look for them."

Kimmelman's essays are like that: he starts out talking about one thing, then moves on to something else, and before you know it, he's talked about a multitude of things in art and life and tied them all together. He writes about Cezanne's mountains, Duchamp's urinal, Yoko Onos's conceptual art, Philip Pearlstein's nudes, Ray Johnson's collages. And he weaves it all in with comments about snapshots, gumball machines, mountain climbing, Bob Ross (whose TV program "The Joy of Painting" demonstrated, step-by-step, how to create a painting in a half hour), and Dr. Hugh Francis Hicks, a dentist who collected 75,000 lightbulbs and opened the Mount Vernon Museum of Incandescent Lighting in his office basement.

"My own interests are not strictly limited to art," Kimmelman says. "As a writer, it's a joy to follow where an idea can take you and try to bring lots of stuff to bear on what could seem like a very limited or small subject. It's like an onion; you peel it, and there's more and more there.

"I love these sorts of books, and I aspired to write one. There are huge books that are all-encompassing and claim to rewrite the world, and smaller books, smaller in size, that reveal themselves to be much larger than you expected. That's the type of book I aspired to write. The process of uncovering things you didn't know were there is part of what art is about. I love thinking that way, how one thing leads into another, into another, into another, taking me places I hadn't expected to go."

Even his chapter titles are intriguing; for example: "The Art of Being Artless," "The Art of Making Art Without Lifting a Finger," "The Art of Collecting Lightbulbs," "The Art of Finding Yourself When You're Lost," "The Art of Staring Productively at Naked Bodies."

He wants readers to come away from the book saying, "Gee, art fits in a vast network of experiences and thoughts, cultural and social circumstances that make it meaningful to me in ways I hadn't thought of or expected," he says.

Art shows us how to live life, he says.

"Artists had taught me to look at the world with wide open eyes, which is very difficult to do," says Kimmelman. "At their best, artists teach you to keep your eyes open, because you never know what you'll find. We tend to walk through life and see things we expect to see, and not notice most of what's going on around us. Art can teach you how to keep your eyes open. You'll never know what you'll find. And it turns out there are all sorts of things out there that can change your life, you just have an open mind and wide-open eyes."

After years of being based in New York, Kimmelman now covers culture and art in Europe, writing about hip-hop in France, condensed operas in Rome, and booksellers in Frankfurt, among other things.

"A lot of things I'm curious about," he says. "One of the great pleasures of being a journalist and a writer, is you're allowed to explore these things and look into all sorts of things that you know nothing about, and pretend to become an expert in it. That's just wonderful.

"I think, having one job for a while, I worried about becoming the person people thought I was. It's the problem of middle age. Before I became that person, I wanted to unsettle myself and try something new, a little different.... I'm hugely grateful and flattered that the paper took me up on this crazy idea and hope that it's paying off. I'm very fortunate to work for a remarkable and historical institution, which is suffering its own financial woes, but believes in doing extraordinary things, because it thinks that in the end, the quality of the paper is a great commodity, is its greatest commodity."

He's saddened and appalled by the current state of arts coverage in American newspapers in general.

"The creeping lowering of standards has turned into a sprint," he says, "and what that ultimately means, is not just the news organizations that all rush to do the same stupid stories will undo themselves, because they are in no way distinguished one from another, but also contribute to the impoverishment of the culture. I still like to believe we got into this profession because there was something aspirational, noble about it, it had a crucial role in the democracy.

"The arts coverage is...a reflection of the newspapers to find the most profitable, whatever scraps of coins are on the street to pick up, stray coins. There are lots of voices out there on the Web that have added to that proliferation, so it's not that nobody's out there. But I do think there's a crucial place for newspapers and magazines of quality to differentiate and make distinctions for people about what is important, and allow people to decide whet whether they're right. A cacophony of voices isn't in itself a sign of health."

It's different in Europe. Though Europe has its share of bad television and silly pop music, he says, "there's still, I think, basic respect for serious forms of culture, and understanding in newspapers and media that there's an audience for discussions, and there is money to be made in printing thoughtful journalism about serious subjects. That's refreshing."

But in many American papers, arts and entertainment coverage is suffering. Often those beats are given to those with no experience, background, or knowledge of the arts.

"The same people who believe that just anybody could write about this stuff would not say that if it were business, or, for that matter, sports," Kimmelman says. "Even sports, it's understood: [there's] a certain amount of knowledge and experience that needs to go along with writing about things that might not be transparently obvious. Newspapers don't expect to send someone who's never heard of baseball to cover baseball, nor do they expect everything to be explained...

"But the people who run these papers are comfortable with things like sports and business, but uncomfortable with culture, and they don't consider it important. So when they do cover culture, they stress lightweight, superfluous types of culture, nothing they would ever counterance if it mattered to them.

"I am fortunate," he says, acknowledging that almost no other paper would've agreed to send a reporter overseas to cover the arts in Europe.

And he's pleased that his book, "The Accidental Masterpiece," is going to be published in German.

"The thing is, most art writing is unreadable," he says. "I wanted to write a book people enjoyed reading, even if they didn't think they had any interest at all in art. It's a literary book whose subject is art.

"I'm happy people responded well to it. I think it speaks to the fact that people do want to feel. First of all, they want a good read. Good writing is its own reward. I also think people want to feel that art and culture has a place in their lives, and that they're not excluded from it if they don't happen to speak the language of the art world.

"The bottom line is, I think it's important to write in a personal way about the things that move you and that you consider important in the world."

if you go

>> What: Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic of the New York Times, talks about his book, "The Accidental Masterpiece: On the Art of Life and Vice Versa"

>> When: 10 a.m. Saturday, Feb. 9

>> Where: The Philharmonic Center for the Arts, 5833 Pelican Bay Blvd., Naples

>> Cost: $32

>> Information: Call (239) 597-1900 or go to www.thephil.org