"Unlike matchbooks, which are made available to a general audience, invitations are distributed on the basis of mailing lists which consolidate a small art audience into an even smaller circle of cultural initiates for whose patronage a specific desire is expressed. The series of invitations to provate, "salon-type" exhibitions Lawler organized with Sherrie Levine under the title "A Picture is No Substitute for Anything" (1981-82) called attention to this function, as did the 1981 event "Louise Lawler and Sherrie Levine invite you to the studio of Dmitri Merinoff..." (a Russian émigré figurative expressionist whose New York studio had been kept intact since his death)."

-from "In and Out of Place" by Andrea Fraser in Art in America, June 1985

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