After viewing the exhibition Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, Viktor Witkowski argues against the accepted view of Forrest Bess as a "visionary artist."

Witkowski writes: "While the visions or dreams that Bess claimed to experience regularly have received most of the attention in numerous articles and essays on his work (in addition to his genital self-surgery), his roles as a skilled observer, informed reader, writer, multifaceted intellectual and engaged individual have been neglected… Forrest Bess is also a painter of all things visible. He is not a copyist, but he clearly paid attention to what surrounded him. These visible things include other works of art, literature, people, history, the politics and ethics of his time, the experience of 'self', the natural world – reflections of it alongside less reliable byproducts like dreams – fevers of the mind – and unfinished thoughts."