The two bartenders at Vermillion last night didn't have a chance. The line for the bar was thick and long before the scheduled event even started. The place was so packed that dozens of people had to stand, and they kept standing for more than two hours to take part in, of all things, a conversation about sculpture.

A little background: John Boylan is Seattle's greatest conversation-starter. He's been organizing casual public get-togethers for more than a decade on subjects ranging from "Art and Community Engagement" to "Solutions" to "Freedom" to "The Persistence of Painting in a Digital Age." This one was called, simply, "Sculpture." Each conversation includes a panel, but after throwing out some opening thoughts the panelists bat things around along with everyone else, and last night's panel was curator Beth Sellars, artists Cris Bruch and Lauren Grossman, and me.

It seems that many, many people want to think and talk about sculpture. I can relate. More than any other single subject, I think about sculpture.

I think about Dan Webb's Little Cuts, the series of photographs he made of his process carving a head out of a block of wood and then carving it as though the flesh were sloughing off of the bones slowly and finally, as the bones disintegrated into sawdust. The actual sawdust from the process is displayed along with the photographs in a fiberglass box on a pedestal.

I think also of the sculpture Trisha Donnelly asked each member of her audience at the Henry several years ago to create in our minds, of a very specific solar eclipse that she was describing, to the soundtrack of "Classical Gas." The eclipse was solid for every person; it moved and changed with the music and Donnelly's narration; it had dimension.

Those were the sculptures I brought up first last night, and I was afraid the sculptors in the room would want to kill me. Lauren Grossman makes her own cast iron! Cris Bruch works with paper, metal, building materials: materials, not frou-frou ephemeralities. And sculptors pay for their physicality. They are at a serious disadvantage in the market: fewer people want to buy three-dimensional, space-eating art than two-dimensional paintings or photographs or prints. Sculptors, with few exceptions, do it for the love. But Grossman didn't kill me; she tackled me with kindness: "See, that's what I love about sculpture. It's about the craziness of taking an idea, like that eclipse, and making it real." Basically, she was saying that my eclipse sculpture wasn't a sculpture—and we were off.

Among the subjects covered: That Grossman is melting down her old works because she no longer has room to store them, and that this is very upsetting to Sellars's curatorial sensibilities. That Malevich's most dangerous work of art was not his black square but his tea set encouraging Russian self-sacrifice (it was never manufactured). That artists don't really know why they want so badly to burn and cut and scrape certain materials. That the dream of sculpture is to be real, and that sculpture and architecture get jealous of one another. That the process of making is the most important thing. That the process is overrated. That sculpture is more interactive than painting. That it is not clear whether the people who touch the sculptures at the Olympic Sculpture Park are touching them to feel them or to break a rule. That it might make more sense to touch those sculptures by taking off one's clothes and rubbing more parts than just the fingertips on the sculptures. (Okay, that last one is my idea and was not necessarily endorsed by anyone else in the room.)

Among the best quotes: "I get tired of the gallery hothouse, you know, we're all rainin' on each other and sunnin' on each other and growin'..." This was spoken by Cris Bruch, whose gallery dealer, Scott Lawrimore, was standing behind Bruch, beaming. No ironies were lost on anyone.

Packed in there like revolutionaries, it wasn't long before someone asked about politics and cosmology; like, the world is crashing, and what are we doing about it sitting in here?

Nothing much, I guess. Nobody had a sculptural stimulus plan. But it felt great to get together, patronize a local business, and talk for hours about how ideas and materials are linked and how they're not. It doesn't add up to a product, but as a process it pretty much ruled.