Modern Art Notes’s Tyler Green is the tough-guy art blogger who can pass a judgment with puritanical speed, who seems to have sources tucked inside every museum in the country, who makes a point of calling bullshit wherever he spots it, and who scolded me, when I first met him because I was chewing gum in an upscale hotel bar. (He also identified me, before we’d ever met, and called me out by name while I was looking at art in Miami; I have no idea how he knew what I looked like.) He is the CIA, the NSA, and the NEA—of the individual-grants years, that is—rolled into one.

At said upscale hotel bar, which was entirely draped in the sort of bright, pure white that my mother, an Ohio farmgirl whose hands were never far from real dirt, told me to stay away from, I asked Tyler about his background. He said he had been a sportswriter (as my father was), and then gone into some kind of political work, and then gotten back into art. At the time, I nodded at the slender, young blogger and his slender, young girlfriend, as though, of course, he’d want to get back into art. Except that later, I realized, when had this sportswriter been in art in the first place?

Today, in an extended entry on his blog, he at least partly explains his love for art. The piece unfolds like a personal essay, building quietly and beautifully to the final paragraphs, and it is really quite understated considering all that is behind it. Those who reduce Tyler to a snark machine might take note of what I’m beginning to believe is a certain amount of innate, almost patrician, restraint on his part. (It would explain the gumphobia.)

By offsetting serenity with ranting, he is also, paradoxically for a New Media exemplar, establishing himself as what newspaper editors see these days as the ideal job candidate: a jack of all trades. A critic. A reporter. An essayist. A columnist. A blogger. A pundit. I’ve often wondered: where is Tyler Green headed? Of all the jobs in the art world, which one does he really want? Is he subtly gunning for something?

In any case, happy Valentine’s Day, MAN. Thank you for the memories.