I learned so much from his appearances on Charlie's show...I'll miss him!

From the NYTimes:
The Curatorial Voice: Kirk Varnedoe
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

It's natural enough to talk about the eye of an art historian. But when it comes to Kirk Varnedoe, who died this week at the age of 57, it's just as important to talk about his voice. His eye, after all, will live on, embodied as it is in the additions he made to the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, where he was the chief curator of painting and sculpture from 1988 to 2001. What has really gone with his premature death is his living voice and everything it represented.

Nearly everyone who met Kirk Varnedoe felt his volubility, the sometimes astonishing flow of words and ideas at his command. There were set pieces in his conversation, favorite stories, well-trod paths. But mostly there was the feeling that a newly begun sentence could wind up going almost anywhere, crossing the plains into an unknown country or doubling back on a settlement that suddenly looked different than it did the first time we passed it. The great talkers — and he was one — are great because they are always embarked on a voyage of discovery.

There was a fine, dark gravel on the streambed of Kirk Varnedoe's voice. Occasionally, a Southern note from his childhood would float to the surface like a perfectly formed bubble. He was a conveyor of knowledge, not a hoarder. No idea, no fact, became quite real to him unless he had passed it along to someone else first.

Despite his volubility, I was always struck by the tangibility of the words he used, whether he was talking about college football, which he had played and coached, or modernism, which he had spent most of his life studying. It was as if he were laying words down on the table one by one as he used them, like brushes in an artist's studio. That was why students crowded into his classes and why the National Gallery of Art had overflow audiences for his Mellon Lectures earlier this year. Something synaptic happened when you listened to Kirk Varnedoe, and, remarkably, something synaptic happened when he listened to you. You never knew what you might discover together.