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Sunday, January 15, 2006
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Pickens Demurs T. Boone Pickens, the famed oilman who recently gave $165 million, exclusively for athletics, to his alma mater, Oklahoma State University, reacted to the today's news that Wesleyan University has received a gift of $500,000, toward construction of an art museum, with two words: "Har har." Asked what he thought of Wesleyan's announcement of the beginning of a campaign to raise $26 million for the museum, Pickens said, "Pansies." When he learned that, according to the Hartford Courant, "The museum will be at the heart of the campus in an elegant brick building that once housed squash courts," Pickens was even more disdainful. "Ruining a perfectly good bunch of squash courts for ... for what? Some goddam art? What's it gonna have in it? You know it won't be LeRoy Nieman."  Pickens laughed again when his interviewer read this from the Courant article: "Understanding and appreciating works of art is a very important part of a liberal education," said Kimerly Rorschach, director of Duke University's newly opened Nasher Museum of Art and an authority on college museums. "It seems quite natural to me that any university would want to address that." "Horseshit." |