A question to ponder: Is the support of 1,000 True Fans better than the here-today, gone-tomorrow affections of a quarter million or more Lesser Fans?

In her recent post on Italian futurism, Marjorie Perloff invites us to interrogate how we define the bounds of artistic movements.

On the weekend of October 15, SFMOMA sponsored a Futurist conference-festival that raised some fascinating issues for me.  My own talk--the keynote the first night--was on Marinetti's 1909 Manifesto and its offshoots, culminating in a look at Gertrude Stein's portrait "Marry Nettie" as a tongue-in-cheek critique of the great Futurist Impresario.