What exactly is the nature of what we (meaning the collective "us" as society at large) now call art? Frank Stella chose to make this the subject of his talk at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts on the afternoon of Wednesday, April 24th, 2002, here in downtown Copenhagen.

Through the serendipitous loss of most of his slide presentation on route from Singapore, Stella was forced to deliver his points with a limited number of visual examples in hand. But this actually worked in his favor, though I suspect that the large crowd of young Danish art students may have been there to see a visual retrospective of Stella’s own work. Stella began by saying he would talk about three things: who he thought was the greatest artist of the 20th century and why; how artists shouldn’t communicate with a client and what exactly he considers to be the key dilemma of contemporary art.