Take my bike, please

I really only did need to pop back into the house for a split second to grab a slip of paper, so I thought nothing of leaning my bicycle against the iron railing in front of my house. The man who was holding the handlebars when I came outside must have expected me to be away longer. Next was the charged, silent debate: That's my bike, I'm not doing anything, You're trying to steal my bike, fuck you, fuck you, I could still take it, I could prevent you. Of course it took only a fraction of a second, before he acceded to my logic and casually slipped away as I stood there looking stern but foolish, dressed up in the proprietor's costume: bicycle helmet, backpack, rolled-up pants leg. Not for one second can you let your guard down around people.

We Want Prenup

Time's Richard Lacayo writes about Alice Walton's offer to Fisk University for its Stieglitz works and asks the right questions about joint custody:

Whether it happens or not, these sharing arrangements are getting to be an ever more common proposal for cash-strapped colleges looking to turn their art collections into revenue. But the deals leave open a lot of unanswered questions. Here's just one. If Walton's offer were accepted by Fisk, would her museum be allowed to lend works from the Stieglitz bequest to other museums? Would Fisk have any say over where the works could travel? When institutions "share" collections, who makes the rules? My guess would be the partner with the checkbook.

Furthermore, is Fisk allowed to travel the collection (if their future financial situation made that a possibility)? Who restores the works, if restoration is ever necessary? Insurance—who pays for that? Do students and scholars working with Fisk University have access to the works (and associated research materials) when they're off campus?

These aren't impossible questions to navigate. And money isn't a question for Crystal Bridges. But though it's a fifty-fifty split, the two interests aren't approaching it as symmetric partners.

Alchemy

Certain parties will be very interested indeed in this product. Courtesy B-Wo, who reviews Mo's finest here.

Take Me to Another Place, Take Me to Another Land

Jonathan Marx reports in The Dickson Herald that Alice Walton "has offered to purchase a 50-percent share in Fisk University's Alfred Stieglitz Collection."

That introduces a fourth party to a table where negotiations are already in play. Previously, Fisk University earned opprobrium from both the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and Tennessee Attorney General Robert Cooper for rushing to deaccession works from the Stieglitz collection, which contains 101 paintings and photographs. The two most notable (and valuable) works in the collection are O'Keefe's Radiator Building—Night, New York (1927) and Marsden Hartley's Painting No. 3 (1913). Time's Richard Lacayo surveys the controversy:

In 2005 the school's president, Hazel O'Leary, came up with an idea that could not only pay to renovate the frayed campus gallery where the Stieglitz Collection has languished but also pump millions of dollars into Fisk's general budget. Why not sell off just a bit of that famous art? But when the school moved to bring Radiator Building to market, it triggered what became a lawsuit by the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, N.M., which moved to block the sale on the grounds that it violated the terms of the painter's bequest. In February the museum offered Fisk a deal. It could sell Radiator Building, but only to the museum, and for $7 million, a price much below what it would go for in the current art market. If Fisk said yes, the museum promised not to block the sale of another painting from the collection, a Marsden Hartley, on the open market. Fisk said yes.

That was where things stood until April 5, when Tennessee attorney general Robert Cooper, whose office has the power to approve or disapprove charitable arrangements, rejected the arranged sale because of the difference between $7 million and what Fisk could get on the open market. Now lawyers for both sides plan to sit down in a judge's chambers to see if a new deal can be worked out.

That hearing is planned for September 6, and the parties will determine whether the university can move forward with the settlement agreement that is already in play (i.e., the deal between the O'Keeffe estate and Fisk). If the court rejects the O'Keeffe Museum settlement, Fisk University officials may then consider Walton's offer.

Given the chance, should they? Walton's $30-million offer for the collection is always-low-prices territory—though the institutions would be going halfsies. I have criticized repeatedly Walton's collecting practices: Crystal Bridges is bolstered by an unfair, sweetheart sales-tax exemption from the state of Arkansas that applies only to Crystal Bridges acquisitions. When the Crystal Bridges collection is finally realized, it will tell the story of bent or broken bequests and money always trumping art's best interest. Given the history, I am not moved by Walton's plea to donor intent. An excerpt from her letter published by The Tennessean:

We believe there is a creative way to honor Ms. O'Keeffe's desire to keep the collection intact and on permanent public display both in Nashville and at Crystal Bridges; and to provide significant financial support to one of the nation's most historic and important institutions of higher learning.

That was not a sentiment she harbored, apparently, when she made offers to buy and remove Philly-unique Eakins paintings from the city's financially strapped art institutions.

That said, Fisk doesn't have many great alternatives. I agree with Tyler Green: The best thing for the Stieglitz Collection would be a long-term loan to the Frist, where the collection has been stored since 2005 anyway. That's a decision in the best interest of the art, the academy, and the community—but it's not in Fisk's best financial interest. The arrangement that the Fisk is currently hashing out in court would split the collection, with the O'Keeffe going to the estate (for cheap), the Hartley going to market (perhaps to Walton?), and the other 99 works staying at Fisk (for now?). On the face of it, Walton's deal seems like the better offer.

As Lee Rosenbaum noted back in April, the state of Tennessee is the only institution that seems to have the public's best interest at heart. It is discouraging that the Fisk has tried to part with its best bequests at bargain-basement prices. In this case, when the community did not rally to preserve these works for Tennessee, Tennessee has at least argued that the community shouldn't get stiffed on the deal.

UPDATE: Lee Rosenbaum: "I am not one of those who have criticized Alice Walton for buying important works from the collections of cultural institutions. [ . . . ] But now, Alice has exceeded the limits of my tolerance."

Poem Without Forgiveness

The husband wants to be taken back
into the family after behaving terribly,
but nothing can be taken back,
not the leaves by the trees, the rain
by the clouds. You want to take back
the ugly thing you said, but some shrapnel
remains in the wound, some mud.
Night after night Tybalt's stabbed
so the lovers are ground in mechanical
aftermath. Think of the gunk that never
comes off the roasting pan, the goofs
of a diamond cutter. But wasn't it
electricity's blunder into inert clay
that started this whole mess, the I-
echo in the head, a marriage begun
with a fender bender, a sneeze,
a mutation, a raid, an irrevocable
fuckup. So in the meantime: epoxy,
the dog barking at who knows what,
signals mixed up like a dumped-out tray
of printer's type. Some piece of you
stays in me and I'll never give it back.
The heart hoards its thorns
just as the rose profligates.
Just because you've had enough
doesn't mean you wanted too much.

—Dean Young, 2006

UR GONNA GET GRAY RAPED

Jessica Valenti writes about "gray rape," a topic that Laura Session Stepp discusses in the latest Cosmo. Stepp reported on gray rape in her book, Unhinged (which took a drubbing in these pages a few months ago). The first excerpt of Stepp's essay strikes me as straightforward, fair reporting:

Oh, the gray area—that insidious "if I hadn't gone to that party" place, that "if I had only stopped after one beer" place, that "if I hadn't worn such a revealing top and come on to that hot guy" place where young women go when someone they probably know lays siege to their most private parts and everyone assumes it was at least partly their fault. More than half the time, they're drunk and can't remember details, and most of the time they don't press charges. [ . . . ] some defense lawyers and even some students have taken to calling such episodes "gray rape" out of a mistaken belief that when both parties have been drinking heavily, responsibility for what happened falls into a gray area.

Only, this trend is redundant, isn't it? This isn't a new "gray rape" category, it's the familiar "date rape" crime that we've had on the books for at least a decade. The difference, it seems—based solely on excerpts here—may be an agenda. Stepp continues:

This is one of the most egregious, and least talked-about, implications of hookup culture. In gray rape, the girl who may have come on like the hunter becomes the hunted. Whose fault is that? For older generations, it seems clear that it's the guy's if she resists in any way or is drunk. Girls [ . . . ] aren't quick to say that, so reluctant are they to see themselves as powerless.

She's not squarely blaming the victims, but she is saying that when women drink alcohol, pursue sex, and seek social status, they contribute to an atmosphere in which date rape is tolerated. Pursuant, if women behaved by the more traditional gender strictures Stepp advocates, you would not find feminist writers like Moe Zkicak asking, "It's not rape unless I say it was, right?"

Maybe that's too much to draw from a handful of excerpts (I haven't seen the Cosmo article—that's one magazine Catherine doesn't bring home). However, the magazine's online bleg for gray-rape stories from readers makes the connection clearer:

We live in a hookup culture, where people rarely "date" traditionally, and women often wind up going home with a male acquaintance they were hanging out with at a party or bar. Usually, there is some drinking involved, possibly a few crossed signals. As a result, many women have experienced what is known as "gray rape," a situation in which they never intended to have sex, but wound up forced into it because until that point, they'd been a willing participant.

As a result, the woman involved is left feeling violated and confused and angry. Has something like this happened to you? If so, Cosmo wants to hear about it. Your story may help and give comfort to other women who are still confused and shaken by their own "gray rape" experience.

"As a result", says Cosmo—but it's not clear that hooking up has led to a scary rise in date rape. According to RAINN, the majority (59 percent) of sexual assaults still go unreported, but rape and sexual assault crimes have fallen by 69 percent since 1993.

I don't believe that the way to continue this downward trend is to retrovise women's social roles; some other folks have some ideas that sound better to me. Courtney Martin in the American Prospect says: more better sex education, please. DCeiver suggests turning the problematic "no means no" prohibition into an "only yes means yes" prescription and has a message for men ("You see that gray area? DON'T PUT YOUR COCK IN IT") that should be written into high-school sex-ed curricula everywhere. And so long as we're talking about high school ed, dropping our minimum age restriction on drinking is worth thinking about. Students aren't any better prepared for drinking than they are for sex by the time they enter college.

Think With the Senses, Feel With the Mind, Drink With the Italians

Cara Ober reports with a tour of Robert Storr's show at the Venice Biennale. I'm bemused by the way she writes off a room of Elizabeth Murray's paintings with an "I hated them," but you should give her a read—she's very accessible and touches briefly on a lot of the artists in the show.

Artist as Monopolist

Though I'm only linking to it now, Ryan Avent responded in a very timely manner to my question about highly skilled labor organization, saying that the Chinese art sweatshop isn't an extraordinary example:

Even for workers with valuable skills, wages are determined by supply and demand. If there is a large pool of similarly skilled artists, then the wages for such workers will be bid down. In the sweatshop case, ability with a paintbrush shouldn't be viewed any differently than other artisanal skills.

The big jumps in bargaining power and wages come from other avenues. On the one hand, skilled craftsmen can organize and erect barriers to entry. Guilds had this effect, as do modern professional organizations; both guarantee quality—to an extent—but also reduce labor supply and push up wages. The Chinese sweatshop workers, like many other skilled and unskilled workers before them, would no doubt have difficulty putting together a Monet Knock-off Painters Union.

On the other hand, a truly outstanding talent offering a unique product can remove himself from the system and develop pricing power. Damien Hirst, in other words, has a monopoly on Hirsts. This allows him to limit supply and raise the price of his art. Plus no one can enter the Hirst market and compete with him.

Emphasis mine. This is an aspect of art that changed totally with the Victorian concepts of authenticity and author, breaking entirely from previous (i.e., Renaissance) ideas about the artist. Consider Elaine Sturtevant (who, it seems, now goes just by Sturtevant): Her work consists entirely of copies of other artists' work. So far as I know, she has not in 40 years created an original artwork (for a typical value of "original"), instead laboriously re-creating painting, sculpture, film, and performance by artists ranging from Andy Warhol to Paul McCarthy. (You may recall her Duchamp copymades in last year's Whitney Biennial.)

Despite the fabricated nature of her work, Sturtevant nevertheless has a monopoly on Sturtevants, so to speak—her works are sold at rates she sets, independently from the value of the works she references but also higher than the value of reproductions like prints. A Sturtevant copy of a Duchamp readymade object is categorically different from a Chinese factory reproduction of a Vermeer, even though the activity is essentially similar. ("Rather a long run for such a short slide," says A Fistful of Euros.)

On the original question of art produced by Chinese sweatshops, Megan McArdle says, "I am willing, indeed eager, to listen to an argument from Mr Capps that this is culturally or artistically a Bad Thing." Sorry to disappoint, but I don't think it is so culturally or artistically Bad. People who hope to buy gauche home decor at Wal-Mart, by all means, have at. In fact, people may buy all manner of Chinese-manufactured widgets at Wal-Mart, these paintings among them. I just don't accept that it is art that these Chinese painters are producing. Sweatshop-produced paintings don't meet this economic precondition of Western art: Art is produced by an artist who has a monopoly on that art, no matter what it is.

Inside the Artist's Studio Sweatshop

Megan McArdle asks whether Chinese art sweatshops resemble Renaissance art apprenticeships. I say nope. Apprenticeships are one stage along a professional track, whereas sweatshop labor is not. Sure, as far as income goes, apprentices don't make anything—that's a full two or three cents less than what these Chinese copycats are paid. But of course the opportunity cost that an intern pays is an investment in big bucks down the road.

Now, I get the sense that McArdle is baiting her readers (and this writer) to deliver forth an encomium to Art and Apollo and to denounce the Chinese for this cheapest debasement of the canon. And, because I know McMegan socially, I know that she wants to stake out the counterintuitive ground here and defend these reproductions as desirable against real and perceived critics who abhor them. But the art reproductions aren't the real issue (and not just because they aren't the real deal, though I am tempted to launch into a tangent on the problem of authenticity). The fact is, insofar as the global art market is concerned, a Dafen Holbein doesn't account for any more than a Soundgarden poster—they're both examples of cheap decor you can buy at Wal-Mart.

Which is not to say that China won't or has not already had a massive impact on the market. But with regard to this story, the significant point is that economic conditions in China are such that highly skilled labor can be organized (or exploited, if you prefer) as if it were the most basic unskilled labor. I'm not the professional economist, though, so I don't know whether this collapse of categories is an unprecedented or even significant aspect of the global market. Ryan? Felix? Tyler?

(Confidential to Sadly, No!: I was so thrilled to get a link from your page—S,N! is one of very few sites that I will read before I have even put on pants— so I was saddened when it turned out to be merely part of a slam on Megan McArdle. Which is fine, whatever, she's my friend who says crazy things about torture. But I'm confused by this specific issue, which is, what, again? Megan threw up some bat-signals and asked for expert opinion from bloggers she knows personally (to whatever extent). Are we not doing that any more? Really, that's deprecated?)

Computer World

Salon decided to write a story about how Catherine and I won our respective categories in the Mediabistro FishbowlDC Hottest Media Types contest—namely, by cheating. But only by passive cheating. It's a critical distinction that you'd totally understand if you lived in the District. In any case, it's a fun article, to which lolcath and I respond here. Now I only need to figure out where this award goes in my CV.

All fun and games, though, at the end of the day, we truly may all rest easy knowing that Nedra Pickler—the Rita Skeeter of the muggle world—lost. Any negative referendum on Pickler is a positive outcome for the universe. The fact that the contest is entirely unrelated to what makes Pickler so horrible is appropriate, since stringing together unrelated concepts is Pickler's stock in trade.

Potriarchy

Kay Steiger points to a piece by Ari Spool in The Stranger that asks why women are never depicted smoking marijuana. Marijuana = mandom, apparently. This doesn't track whatsoever with my own observations (or Steiger's). I've never witnessed any sort of gender divide in practice when it comes to any sort of drug use, except, maybe, with regard to very coded legal drugs (cosmos, Virginia Slims, the red Mountain Dew).

Spool then interviews some real live female pot smokers, who turn out to be normal people just like you and me, but female, and high. That part of the piece is unfortunate, since I already know plenty of women who have smoked pot. I'm curious about the chicken/egg argument here: Does the media gender the drug? Or does the media depict a drug that is gendered?

Feministing asks whether smoking pot is a feminist act. Maybe so, but I think we need to know more about the women who toke to say for sure. My instinct is that we're not all wrong and that higher up along the SES ladder, similar proportions of men and women smoke pot.

In any case, I'm ready to give up forever Half Baked and that towel from South Park, out of solidarity with The sisterhood. I can think of exactly one movie scene in which a woman gets high (Nicole Kidman's character in Eyes Wide Shut). I'm sure there are more instances in film history, and I imagine I've seen them and simply forgotten.

Catherine Andrews Will Have Her Revenge on DC

Overhead yesterday near Gallery Place:

Corner guy (to passing woman): Damn, you look gorgeous.
Nation of Islam: I don't think you need to be saying something like that to her.
Corner guy: Sorry, I didn't know that was your girl. It was just a compliment.
Nation of Islam guy: She's not my girl. In my faith, the best compliments are kept in the heart.
Corner guy: I'm not Muslim.
Nation of Islam guy: I know this. But compliments shouldn't creep people out.

Later, I saw the Nation of Islam dude again, and the woman clearly was his girl—I conclude he was feigning otherwise in hopes that the corner guy might learn the larger lesson.

Heartbreak Hotel

Happy Elvis Day.

Elizabeth Murray, R.I.P.

Elizabeth Murray, Bop, 2002–2003.

The news of Elizabeth Murray's death this week is sad, and especially dispiriting given all the artist's recent activity. Not just the long overdue accolades she received—bestowed in the form of a fine retrospective as well as sometimes-grudging critical recognition that painting existed, and even thrived, during the 1970s, with Murray foremost among the painters who kept on keepin' on. But also the paintings she did right up until her death. For all the reasons she was able to bootstrap her way into an art world that was in no mood for her work, her recent paintings continue to thrill: Foregoing prescription and the prevailing theories for the pure possibility of form and never-ending experiment.

Three Degrees

Check out this jam. Doesn't this sound as fresh as anything you'd expect to hear out there?

• The Three Degrees, "Collage"

It's a 1970 single by a Philly trio, and it has the complete assortment of wah-wah pedals, horns, and vibraphones that you'd expect from a studio act back then or something off WOXY today.

Correction

Commenter Joseph notes in comments below and a few people e-mailed to point out that Mark Wentzel's chair, which I describe in this shorty about "Useless" at Project 4, is a super-inflated Eames Lounge Chair, not a Barcelona Chair. I confused them—my apologies.

Mark Wentzel, Xlounge, 2006

The show is on view through September 8.

One Bourbon, One Book, One Beer

I still thrill to walk into a Half-Price Books when I'm home in Texas, but around here, I shop almost exclusively at Kramerbooks. There, despite the anxiety that settles in knots along my neck and shoulders whenever I walk into the store, which seems designed not so much to gently guide the curious book-lover to his destination as to forcibly herd the frantic book-shopper to the market. Browsing the new books on the front table? It's a thrilling pile but it's nerve-racking to go up against other customers like fashionistas at a sample sale. Then there's the appallingly bad cafe, where both food and service never fail to disappoint.

Two things draw me to Kramerbooks. One is the air-conditioning. I swear, Kramerbooks is the absolute coolest place in the District on a hot day. The other is the tiny bar, where they serve Shiner on tap. Hey, I know I'm easily swayed by a pint of Shiner—I can only be up front about it. But frankly, when I have the time and cash, nothing sounds more relaxing than picking up a new book from the list of authors I mean to investigate and siding up to the bar in the back, removed from the crowds but well within the purview of the industrial-strength air conditioner.

Not exactly what Mark has in mind. I don't even know: Does anyone have strong opinions about the used bookstores around here?

I Heart VY: Babies Are Delicious Edition

Tennessee Titans coach Jeff Fisher benched Vince Young for the team's debut exhibition matchup, apparently after Young broke a team rule. But which team rule? Let's say the penalty fits the crime: Young must have been caught hosting professional bumfights, or sponsoring a startup Colombian drug cartel. There just can't be any truth to the rumor that Tennessee handed the Washington Redskins this easy victory because he broke curfew. Vince Young is a monster. He simply cannot be expected to be home by lights-out or to abide by any other law of man. Vince Young eats this baby? Fine, ground him. Never ever ever ever ever eat a baby, Vince Young.*

But if he did miss curfew, or devour a toddler, Fisher ought to cut him some slack. Looking back on last season—and that calls for a long, longing backward glance past the summer, which has dragged on for an agonizing 8 or 9 months now, without even a World Cup or Olympics to fill in the televised sports vacuum—Young exceeded every expectation. Back at Texas, he was the best there was at what he did, even if what he did wasn't very complicated. People always say that Young was only ever expected to give the field one read, and if that option didn't look good, he would tuck n' run. True, Texas's playbook was thin, but critics tend to overlook his phenomenal passing stats, as if the numbers don't count because he didn't arrive at them by less efficient second or third option plays. Turns out, in the NFL Young is playing all his options and the sidearm isn't any career-threatening handicap.

Here's one to watch on Dallas: Isaiah Stanback. Once he's healthy he's going to be the kind of wide receiver that people talked about when they thought about moving Vince Young away from QB. Six-foot-two, speedy, knows how to read the defense—Stanback has a shot at becoming the next Randel El. At the time I thought it was weird that Dallas drafted a QB with a messed-up foot in the fourth round, but now I get it.

* Kim Thayil is also known to eat babies.

Give in to Temptation!

"It's tempting to be snooty about Starbucks' attempt to enter the world of fine art."

Brand New Heavy

Summer is the time when a young man's thoughts turn to metafictional devices. And no less fine a young man than Julian Sanchez is puzzling over one of Richard Powers's literary strategies. Sanchez writes:

[Powers] routinely alludes to a familiar company or institution, making it clear beyond any doubt which he's referring to, but then either scrupulously and pointedly avoids naming it, such that the absence of the name almost becomes a distracting presence itself, or else he gives it a phony name.

I've never read any of Powers's work, so I can't say anything about that. For what it's worth, the author chimes in and largely consents to Sanchez's reading.

Sanchez's prompt launched my own flight of fancy: on Matthew Barney. Barney's take on brands might be the inverse of Powers's. According to Sanchez (and the author), Powers provides the reader with the context to situate a fictional institution within the world in which the reader lives; that world, the real world, runs parallel to the world Powers creates, if I understand what they're getting at.

Barney, on the other hand, presents brand symbols without any context—in inappropriate contexts, even. And his world is magical, to say the least.

Take Cremaster 1: How does the Goodyear blimp fit into a film about zygotic gender determination, featuring a Busby Berkeley musical staged on Boise's Bronco Stadium? In the narrative, the twin blimps are ovaries; inside each, a character (named Goodyear) coexists. (Right, in both of them. What'd I say? Magic.) Goodyear fiddles with some grapes, arranging them in various patterns. In one blimp, the grapes are red, and in the other, they're white. Meanwhile, the kick line on the field marches in the shapes dictated by the grape arrangements. It's a gradual but tremendous sculptural process—the magical miracle of life, you see.

Ovaries, okay—but why Goodyear blimps? It's tempting to consider this decision like any other in his series—as layered and oblique. If I consider the Goodyear brand, I might think expansively about vulcanized rubber and Hephaestus (god of sculpture, you know). But I think that when Barney selects a brand symbol, it is irreducibly that symbol, in order to open up different schedules of meaning in an object. Sometimes a blimp is just a blimp.

And these blimps are there to be Goodyear blimps. They hover over the football field; so does Barney's camera, as he reproduces Busby Berkeley's soaring, signature shots. Barney's thinking about framing, and how he can use film to develop his sculptural ideas. Inside the blimps—with the girl and the grapes—he's recording a narrative that is fundamental, microscopic, and subcellular. But outside—well, it doesn't get much bigger than a dancing chorus broadcast via the aerial blimp cam.

So the brand-name blimps have a place in the narrative, but they're also there because they line up vertically with other elements in the movie that are about film and not just a part of Barney's plot.

"Part of the point is to stop and slow readers, to make them look again", says Powers over at Sanchez's lounge. Powers doesn't want readers forgetting that they're not in the real world. Barney doesn't need to worry about this—but he is clear about the fact that he's working with cinema in a particular way.

It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.

You'll be creeped out by how much you enjoy this song—it's a perfect dance track, recorded by a woman (!) named Q Lazzarus whose career amounts to this and little else. Would you fuck you? You'd fuck you. You'd fuck you hard.

Chemistry

The joke that swept poker tonight:

Q: What do you get when you cross Ace of Base with Lords of Acid?
A: Veruca Salt!

I'll Be Here All Weekend

The District gets a proper fat weekend arts section starting August 26, when the Washington Post debuts its combined Style and Arts sections. This is a great convenience—now you know exactly what sections of the paper you want to throw out. [rimshot]

I'm just kidding. The Sunday arts section will still have Book World. [rimshot]

Now is the time on G.p when we dance.

For Campus Progress, I've got a trio of electronic rock record reviews up: Mirrored by Battles, Fancy Footwork by Chromeo, and † by Justice.

The Candidate Begs To Differ

The WaPo writeup of the Iowa GOP primary debate quotes Mitt Romney's diss on Barack Obama and the Obama campaign's response:

"I mean, in one week [Barack Obama] went from saying he's going to sit down, you know, for tea, with our enemies, but then he's going to bomb our allies," [Mitt] Romney said. "He's gone from Jane Fonda to Dr. Strangelove in one week."

Bill Burton, a spokesman for Obama, quickly responded that "the fact that the same Republican candidates who want to keep 160,000 American troops in the middle of a civil war couldn't agree that we should take out Osama bin Laden if we had him in our sights, proves why Americans want to turn the page on the last seven years of Bush-Cheney foreign policy."

It might have been a timely response, but it certainly doesn't read quickly. Romney's reasoning is bogus, but his parting shot was a good quip. Democrats can do shorter and sharper without going shallow, I'm sure of it.

That's the only substantive jab that came out of the debate, and it's weak sauce—the rest of the articles notes one astonishing GOP quote after another, in which candidates vacillate between wholly empty rhetoric and frighteningly authoritarian policy prescriptions. A special nod to Tom Tancredo, who (as Timothy Noah notes) says—out loud and while other people are present—that given the opportunity, he would protect the United States by bombing Mecca and Medina. This is all to say that you really ought to be setting your TiVo for this stuff.

Little Schnozzy

New baby anteater at the National Zoo!

Verdict: adorable! Read this WaPo article about it and tell me, don't you think the prose is sassy?

In darker news from the animal kingdom, I am sorry to tell you that an estimated half of all koalas have Chlamydia. It's true, they are very slutty bears. For koalas, the clap can lead to blindness, infertility, and a condition called "dirty tail". Fortunately, the outlook is good for the development of a new vaccine. No word still on when we're getting koalas at the National Zoo.

Ground Control to Major Motion Picture

To note today's Phoenix launch, Nasa has debuted a video series on the challenge of getting to Mars. The first installment is satisfyingly militaristic, featuring the standard submarine-movie soundtrack and the text that appears across the bottom of the screen to identify time and location but more importantly bleep in such a way to let you know that government/potentially classified text is being typed.

Unfortunately, it's dreadfully dull. The short is about how it's hard to ship satellite-sized packages from Colorado to Cape Canaveral. Granted, it did rain during the drive from the lab to the military base for transport—but that can't possibly even be on the list of worst-case scenarios, since rain poses no threat of the satellite exploding. Nasa doesn't even show the viewer how the convoy caravan would respond to (for instance) an attack by the Taliban.

But another movie about interplanetary bacteria is much better. It's got a picture of a hypothetical far-distant planet that looks like Earth but with rings, along with a British scientist—that's crucial—explaining that there are no shortcuts in the search for trace organic compounds in the dirt. Now we're getting somewhere.

Yet Nasa's still missing the big picture—the defining element that makes Nasa movies Nasa movies.

Ed Harris. And nerds who erupt into fist-pumping cheers in Houston. Probably just a loop of that would do.

Philly Visit

In this week's City Paper, I penned a pan of "A Good Time Is Now" at KNEW Gallery—although I reserve praise for Michael Ciervo's work.

Michael Ciervo, Fawns, 2007. (Note that Ciervo's Web site lists this work as Untitled; KNEW Gallery gave me the title I used for the article.)

Ciervo is based in Philly and is new to me; since his CV lists his most recent show as a student exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, that's presumably the case for a lot of people seeing his work now. There are some things in this painting that go unexplained: Why, for example, are the figures rendered in a nearly Mannerist scale, when other figurative elements—what can be seen of the house and deer—are depicted more exactly? Nevertheless I appreciate the lancing effects of the light, the way that he has used the surface as a refractive lens between figurative and abstract realms. (I've only got a second to post this, so I'll have to expand on the reasons that his work intrigues me some other time.)

And on the City Paper's Web site, but not in the print edition, is an item on Kata Mejia, who is performing courtesy of Randall Scott Gallery for two more nights on 14th Street each night. This article was bound for the print edition, but there was a minor misunderstanding owing in part to the fact that I had the idea to do the piece only after visiting RSG on late Saturday afternoon—well after pitch deadline. In any case, Mejia (another Philly artist) performs tonight and tomorrow.

Pie Are Squared

Anil Dash and Kieran Healy explain that some publications have taken a shine to square pie charts. Here's the example they've both posted (the left chart taken from the New York Times; the right, from Wired):

Stylish, maybe, and the pie format certainly has its shortfalls, but Healy explains why square doesn't take the circle:

The main problem with this [square] style of presentation is that it uses two dimensions to display unidimensional data. As the graphic on the right, especially, makes clear, the layout of the subcomponents of the graph is arbitrary.

My first thought was about the use of color, and how color (and of course, pattern) could be used by scheming editors and their nefarious art departments to sway in subtle ways a reader's appreciation of the graph. If you were to remove the data tags, after all, you would have forms that would read in appreciable ways to a viewer.

Josef Albers, White Line Square VII, 1966.

What would Josef Albers say? Here are some potentially pertinent lines from a 1964 concrete essay, "The Origin of Art":

THE ORIGIN OF ART:
The discrepancy between physical fact
and psychic effect

THE CONTENT OF ART:
Visual formulation of our reaction
to life

THE MEASURE OF ART:
The ratio of effort to effect

THE AIM OF ART:
Revelation and evocation of vision

Wordy guy, that Albers. (That's the long and short of that essay.) In another essay from the same year, titled "The Color in My Paintings", Albers expands on the function of color within the set pattern of his "homage to the square" series:

[Colors] are juxtaposed for various and changing visual effects. They are to challenge or to echo each other, to support or oppose one another. . . .

[ . . . ]

Such action, reaction, interaction—or interdependence—is sought in order to make obvious how colors influence and change each other: that the same color, for instance—with different grounds or neighbors—looks different. . . .

[ . . . ]

Such color deceptions prove that we see colors almost never unrelated to each other and therefore unchanged; that color is changing continually: with changing light, with changing shape and placement, and with quantity which denotes either amount (a real extension) or number (recurrence). And just as influential are changes in perception depending on changes of mood, and consequently of receptiveness.

All this will make [us] aware of an exciting discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect of color.

Of course, all the concrete abstract painters working at this time were thinking experimentally and focusing on the theatricality of abstract painting, though I'd say that Albers was one of few to do the science right and narrow that focus down to a single variable. Given his belief that color value is contextually determined, I doubt Albers would agree that color could be arbitrarily assigned, which has perhaps not a whole lot to do with data presentations so long as you are trying to have a very serious Friday.

Wherehouse?

Jessica Gould at the CP confirms that the owners intend to move the Warehouse to 3400 11th St. NW, two blocks from the Wonderland Ballroom. Great news.

Moving On Over

I've heard this same rumor that The Warehouse will re-open in Columbia Heights at 11th and Park, and I think it's the god's honest truth.

Other longstanding local art institutions will be changing addresses well before summer 2008; more on that soon enough.

Joy Garnett, "Strange Weather"

[For last week's City Paper, I wrote an item on "Strange Weather", a show of nine paintings by Joy Garnett at the National Academy of Sciences. Sadly, the piece fell through the news hole. The show ended this week, so I'm printing the review here—and, far from the reach of copy, I expanded on a few ideas.]

Joy Garnett, Evac, 2005.

Like the images on which they're based—photographs of New Orleans snapped during and after Hurricane Katrina—Joy Garnett's paintings are sensational. "Strange Weather", an exhibit of nine landscapes in oil, show both political and painterly acumen. The New York–based painter takes the long view: She selects, or rather appropriates, artistic and journalistic photographs of the devastated city, most of them snapped from significant physical remove. By painting from these landscape and aerial photographs, Garnett adds another remove—one that has the result of making the images more immediate.

The fact that she paints these images changes their context. Certainly, her expressionistic style adds intimacy; Garnett is a patient painter, and she chooses carefully when to depart from her expansive brush stroke. Consider the thick dobs of light paint that rise off the surface of Strange Weather 32 or the melee of Flood 5. Moreover, Garnett has chosen to treat Katrina through the unlikely lens of landscape painting, a genre that has its own associations for viewers. And when it comes to political art, no one expects a landscape exhibition.

Viewers have associations with the root images themselves—varying degrees of horror with the storm, its consequences, its political implications, and its depiction in the media. By the images Garnett selects and by her mediation of these images, she addresses all these responses.

Joy Garnett, Flood 5, 2006.

Flood 2, for example, looks like no catastrophe so much as the smiting of Sodom and Gamorrah: A great tower of smoke rises in the background, while in the foreground a hot cherry fireball burns brightly. Buildings and other evidence of human activity are lost in a tidal wash of sea, ash, and oil.

For Evac, Garnett selects a stretch of lost highway on which only one vehicle moves, the landscape black and the sky crimson and yellow. This image is ambiguous—it's impossible to tell whether the vehicle is coming or going, first or last.

In the most vivid painting in the series, Flood 5, flesh-toned fire and choking smoke are reflected on a madly painted, oil-slicked body of water. Garnett pushes this image to the point of voyeurism, to match and comment on the original photo, finding something that the photographs don't—calling to mind Kasimir Edschmid's lines, "The expressionist does not look, he sees."