In other words you won’t find Close just sitting around, staring at a canvas and waiting for a vision to descend on him from above. On the contrary, he must be one of the hardest-working figures on the cultural landscape. He painstakingly produces his large-scale photo-based oil portraits of friends and family with his patented post-Pointilliste grids while pursuing multiple careers: exacting printmaker; photographer of outsized Polaroids and exquisite daguerreotypes; guest curator of “Attention to Detail,” the inaugural show at Glenn Fuhrman’s flag Art Foundation, in Chelsea; and art world booster, lending his name and physical presence to museum openings and fund-raising galas with an impressive regularity.

It’s the tireless doers like Close who provide the creative fuel for the particular part of the universe we inhabit. But what drives them, and how do they pull it off with such seemingly effortless grace? Those questions were the impetus behind our cover story, “A Day in the Life,” in which we shadowed—some might say stalked—five art superstars from sunrise to sunset, and beyond. Ken Yeh, Christie’s peripatetic man in Hong Kong; Bettina Korek, a dynamic young contemporary-art promoter in Los Angeles; Piotr Uklanski, the Polish-born artist now showing with the Gagosian gallery; Christian Deydier, the outspoken dealer in Chinese bronzes who also oversees the influential Paris Biennale; and Gary Tinterow, New York’s most erudite and, arguably, most charming curator—every one of them boasts monumental ambitions and Olympian stamina.

The same, by the way, can be said of the remarkable international team of photographers (all members of Magnum, the legendary photojournalism collective) and writers who helped us bring these moving targets into sharp focus. As we put to bed the issue you’re holding in your hands, I couldn’t help thinking about the near-miracles the small Art+Auction staff performs each month—and of something else Chuck Close said at the UBS lunch. He distilled the creative process down to this striking image: Artists, according to Close, are simply “pushing one bit of paint after the next, just as writers push one word after the next.”

From that I might extrapolate that magazine editors (and reporters and art directors and photo researchers) push one hunch after the next, producing a series of ideas that blossoms into a series of narratives that, if the winds are blowing in our favor, blossoms into an edition of a magazine that coalesces and crackles in a way never seen before.

It’s quite a feat of alchemy, creating from the wonderful mess of the art market—secretive, suspicious, unregulated, rife with rumors and rivalries and larger-than-life protagonists—a coherent picture month after month. Who, after all, really wants to talk on the record about the politics of art-fair admission? The real forces behind a painting’s reattribution? The reasons some killer work of art did or did not find a buyer willing to pay its astronomical price? (This from a guy who was raised to believe it’s rude to discuss money in public.)

Somehow we get the story and present it to you in a form that, we hope, doesn’t show the hard labor behind it. As Close’s work proves, that’s the ultimate achievement.

"From the Editor" originally appeared in the June 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's June 2008 Table of Contents.