"It's an exalting experience," she said, "even more than the first time, and I was completely blown away, but you know what? I realized something. Some of those early paintings, the portraits and still lifes. If you take them entirely out of context, and if you forget that they happened to be painted by a genius, you'd think you were looking at something out of a thrift shop."

"I see what you mean," I said, "but isn't that a little like looking at a Jackson Pollock and saying, 'My kid could do this'?"

"No," she said. "Because I'm not knocking Matisse. I'm putting in a word for the anonymous unheralded amateur."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean context is everything," she said.

The next day she beeped TJ and hired him to mind the store while she hit every thrift shop she could get to. By the end of the week she had covered most of Manhattan, sorting through hundreds and hundreds of paintings and buying almost thirty, at an average price of $8.75. She lined them up and asked me what I thought. I told her I didn't think Matisse had anything to worry about.

"I think they're great," she insisted. "They're not necessarily good, but they're great."

She picked out her six favorites and had them framed in simple gallery-style black frames. She sold two the first week, one for $300 and one for $450. "See?" she said, triumphant. "Stuff 'em in a bin at the Salvation Army at ten bucks apiece and they're thrift-shop art that nobody looks at twice. Treat them with respect and price them at three to five hundred and they're folk art, and people think they're a steal. I had a woman in just before closing who fell in love with the desert sunset. 'But this looks like paint-by-number,' she said. 'That's just what it is,' I told her. 'It was the artist's favorite medium. He worked only with paint-by-number.' What do you bet she comes back tomorrow and buys it?"