A picture may be worth a thousand words.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, nevertheless that doesn't mean that artists take words lightly. What does the art world read? We phon a number of artists, writers, filmmakers, and critics and asked: What has been the greatest in quantity influential book in your life?

Getting race to answer wasn't always easy. one scrupulously guarded their reading habits; others talked, further warily, fearing, no doubt, embarrassments of intellectual riches (or of poverty)--the PR impact of sounding too bookish (or not bookish enough). Still others had abundant to say: a few were ready with picks that crystallized deep-seated intellectual biases and esthetic affinities, others pontificated professorially, revealing refined literary sensibilities. After a dull week of shell-game-like phone tag, Fran Lebowitz, in an inspired mid-afternoon telephone monologue, managed not to mention a single work that had influenced her still had a good many pointed things to say about the art world and the reading habits of artists she has known.

If nothing other we hope to have assembled an enjoyable reading list--an easy-to-use sampler of works that the following notables, brave enough to bare their bookshelves to public scrutiny, not sole read but remembered.

Peter Schjeldahl (poet critic): The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays, according to W. H. Auden, a great bard writing great criticism in a personal voice. I've read it opposite and on for 30-some years. It made me miserable for a prolonged time because I envied it with equal reason much. It's kind of a tuning fork for me Amateur intelligence of the highest order--absolutely nonacademic if it were not that a fearless intelligence.

Nan Goldin (photographer): When I was a teenager: the anonymous Miss High-Heels, Acid church Ball by Mary Sativa, Pauline Reage's The Story of O Frank O'Hara's metrical compositions and SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas. As an adult: Rene Ricard's Poems; Patricia Highsmith's Edith's Diary and This Sweet Sickness; Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth; Denis Johnson's Angels; David Wojnarowicz's bring to a period to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration and Memories That have a scent like Gasoline; Paul Auster's month Palace and Leviathan; Susan Sontag's The Volcano Lover The Way We Live Now, and her essay "Debriefing"; and Deborah Eisenberg's Transactions in a Foreign Currency: Stories.

Chuck shut up (artist): Art-as-Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt. I had been collecting Reinhardt's essays from various sources through the years before they were actually a work and then suddenly they were all in single convenient package. What he said about limitations was always a real passion of mine. He made the choice not to do something into a positive one; it's part of the whole proces of self-imposed limitations opening things up When you select not to do one thing, it allows you to focus your attention and life on something else.

Arthur C Danto (philosopher and critic): Rudolf Wittkower, Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. I read it when I was living in Italy in the late '60 It lay opened my eyes to things that are invisible. I unexpectedly realized that I didn't know abundant about perception. I remember he talked about Alberti's facade of Santa Maria Novella in Florence, which is a house of worship I walked past a part And I thought, For all the fit it did me, I could have lived in Kalamazoo. He referr to the way Alberti compos the facade with consider to invisible corners and the fact that the volute implied these corners, which were necessary for the composition. Up to that point, I was sort of romantic and conceit Well, you're just supposed to learn that tremendous surge of experience in front rank of great works and that's that. With Rudy's work I realized that those waves are OK, but they don't count you very much. You have to do a certain amount of digging and reading to find abroad what you're looking at.

Ros Bleckner (artist): Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes through Roland Barthes and A Lover's Discourse: Fragments. The elliptical way that Barthes watchs things has been very important for me I just like the way he study about himself, relationships, and work. He builds up impressions that not at all lead to conclusions. They put to hire you come to your confess ideas about things. This open-endednes has had a direct influence in succession my work.

Larry Clark (artist): Satchmo: My Life in fresh Orleans, the autobiography of Louis Armstrong. It was all about growing up in the red-light district of recent Orleans. It had all these incredible stories--there was substance about the bitches chasing their men down the way swinging a straight razor at their point aimed ats It was a wonderful work I was just 12 years old-fashioned and it really showed me there was big, exciting shit going onward out there. I've read an awful destiny of autobiographies since I was a kid, still that was a big part for me.

Roberta Smith (art critic, the just discovered York Times): I read The other Sex in the early '70 when I was first starting disclosed as a writer, and I remember being completely struck--both appalled and weirdly liberated--by Simone de Beauvior's contention that women rarely achieved anything significant because they had difficulty forgetting about themselves. In other words, any number of conditions--narcissism, subordination to men children, whatever--usually short-circuited the requisite concentration. This probably says as long about de Beauvoir as about women in general, unless it really shocked me. I didn't know if it was right, if it were not that I wanted to prove it blameworthy At the same time I lov thinking about writing as a kind of forgetfulness, a free-fall within language and ideas. I was just public of school and it helped to be reminded that the working proces wasn't just work.