There is a consistent thread of peripatetic generosity in this show that addresses a rambling, surprising range of subjects including punk rock, architecture, public space, subject-object relationships, time, Dean Martin, media, theater, corporate design, Reichian Therapy, site specificity and Jimmy Carter. If this were a guy on the street saying all this while you were waiting for a cab in New York, you would fall into one of two groups — the one who would stick around and see what the guy had to say, or be the one who gets into the first cab.

If you would simply cross the street to avoid the best of Conceptual art, you are not alone. The scientist and Modern art enthusiast I encountered at dinner the night after the press-preview, growled at the mention of Conceptual art. Peter Schjeldahl of The New Yorker was grumpy and dismissive of the Robert Smithson retrospective a few years back, and may regard Dan Graham with the same hairy-eyeball-over-the-spectacles attitude when the show travels to the Whitney. The Postmodern fiction writer Donald Barthelme, had zero tolerance for Conceptual art and stated publicly: "Had I decided to go into the Conceptual art business, I could turn out railroad cars full of that stuff every day." Would that have been so bad?

… Whatever you may think about the form and context Graham works in, when it comes to producing reflections on culture, Dan Graham does not mess around. He was there at the birth of performance art, conceptual art, and site specific installation and he's still there after 45 years. During that time he really churned stuff out and he became the artists' artist, a patriarch at the top of his lineage — and to a large extent, celebrating Graham and the survival of his lineage is what this show is about.

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