They're the best they are at what they do, and what they do isn't very nice if your art sucks.
I'm pleased as punch to announce that I was invited to join the Culture Pundits network, an elite group of 25 (now 26) art bloggers. The advertisement you see on the right is one that makes sense for a network of cultural sites that together reaches a broad, niche audience, even if traffic per any individual site is small relative to other sites with ads. Having made it rain, then, we sit back, let the haters hate, and watch the money pile up.
Merely associating myself with these bloggers makes me to put more work into the site. A lot of those blogs are daily reads for me — please take a moment to click through and check out sites by contributors. There's a Twitter feed and all the rest, too.
Laffy-taffy–shakin' president of Prussia Spencer Ackerman has a new blog home with no holds barred. Attackerman—try it!
Sixteen-hundred words from Lee Siegel about Lee Siegel being Lee Siegel. About the crystallizing moments of our era that fractured Lee Siegel. About the negation of Lee Siegel. About Lee Siegel and Lee Siegel, about sprezzatura and sprezzatura. Also, about Jon Stewart.
Lee Siegel, crashing through the blogosphere. Go read Spencer.
That art for nerds set that was floating around last week? Taken down by its author, but the images can still be seen here. (Use the arrows in the sidebar box to scroll through the set.)
and
are top notch.
I'm joining Ann, Ezra, Kay, Matt, and Spencer in a dialog about The Wire hosted by The American Prospect. The forum is WireTAP, and the first round is up now. Check in three more episodes from now for the next update from the District Co-Op. Many thanks to Ann Friedman and Phoebe Connelly for putting this together.
I think I might know a Web designer or two who would trade expertise for prints. If that's you, Brian Ulrich would like to bend your ear.
From Gloss, one of my favorite new blog finds, on Judd Apatow:
Don't let the eye-dropper's worth of character development he gave the women in Knocked Up fool you, Judd Apatow treats objects like women, man. His female characters are at best goalposts, there to measure your male narrative arc against—motherly when you are ready to lose your virginity; pregnant and employed when you finally outgrow the stoner act; drunk and waiting to give you a blow job when you finally show up at the high school party, even though you've only talked to her once. The joyous parade of penises at the end of Superbad is exactly the point—this is the world we live in. Apatow's male character (really, there's just one) shows that it's painful growing into his role as penis bearer in the planet's last surviving empire. But guess what, tough guy, you still get to wear the penis in the world.The rest of J's comments about quirk and gender are worth your time, but I gave this chunk the blockquote treatment because, while I wholeheartedly agree with his take on Knocked Up—irritating conservative commentary dressed up in an even more irritating stand-up performance by Seth Rogen—I hold Superbad in slightly better esteem. So long as we're going to explore male gender (and this I approve—my friend Sarah describes this trend as men, having internalized some feminist concepts, suddenly realizing that they also have a gender), it's worth doing so in a way that doesn't gloss over certain realities of penis-having at the sunset of American empire. Sure, Wes Anderson's films don't treat women so poorly, but they're also not illuminating, either. If you can look past the anti-feminist women characterizations in Superbad (which are gross and not worth actually skipping over, but bear with me)—you have a film in which the men basically treat each other terribly throughout. That's novel. In the high-school morality tale, brohem is such a firm rule governing male-male relationships that you don't ever have to establish the tenets of brohem—you only need to introduce the conflict, that single violation of brohem, whatever it may be, in order to confirm the obvious, absolute, unquestionably given and universal rule that is brohem. Superbad follows that track to a certain extent, and has the convenient happy ending, but it also features enough instances of cruelty to undermine brohem as this contour-free base state between men. Rather the movie reveals brohem as a strategy, a way to negotiate the intra-gender dynamic. I'm not just talking about the part where they hit each other in the balls.
MORE: One more thing. It's more than ridiculous that they cast this film with one fat guy and one skinny guy, with the skinny guy playing the character you're supposed to identify with (I guess) and the fat kid who's essentially his foil. Granted, they do much better than some in actually developing a narrative for the bigger kid, but we really ought to be beyond this point where the large guy only plays the fool to an attractive woman/skinnier fellow.
Of course Rachel "just gets better and better"—Matt keeps cooking her more and more amazing anniversary dinners. I'd gay-marry him before I even saw the entree. Mazel tov to the happy couple on their third.
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?)
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.
Nerd gossip! I got caught up in a conversation about Vietnam with a friend at the bar and ended up missing all those bands. Funny, just last night, I was at this chic place on the Lower East Side and someone was telling me I should check out this new band called Middle Distance Runner.
Henry Farrell writes today at Crooked Timber:
I'm one of those people who find the new New York Times 'helpful' feature of pulling up a dictionary when you click on a random word, really annoying
Emphasis his, and I share his frustration. I bet you do too, you, reader, who has seen through my HTML ruse; I bet some of you were clickring before you had begun to read and never noticed the blanked-out text at all. For you, clickrer, clickring facilitates reading, and that's why you find the Times's purportedly populist property preposterous.
What's to be done? The Times has ignored the cries of the very readership it intends to enlighten with its barrage of pop-ups; also, all my telephone calls and e-mails. Many of you noted technological workarounds, but I refuse to add unnecessary tools to block unwanted features. Rather I ask the New York Times to come to its senses and return usability to the user. So I can only hope that you like-minded readers will raise ever higher the banner and echo ever louder the refrain: Bring Back Free Clicking! We won't be cowed by ad clutter!
One of the New York Times's keenest online features is the sidebar window that allows you to toggle between the most frequently e-mailed and most frequently blogged articles. Select a cherished preconceived notion about navel-gazing Internerds/the great unwashed masses and find up to 20 bullet points to confirm your suspicions!
Check out the peculiar data from the arts section:
versus
And the last time I checked, there were only two or three top-blogged stories. As it happens, I just ran down my visual art RSS feeds, and of about 40 bloggers, only one had posted a link today to an article in the Times. Which only confirms my dearly held suspicions about the MSM. Arts bloggers are too busy writing original content to bridge the gaps in the dailies' coverage to write much about what the dailies think. For example, Lee Rosenbaum has written a lot on last night's recordbreaking Sotheby's contemporary art auction without mentioning this article once.
Sorry, folks, only one-hitters until I'm out of the weeds. Courtesy of Crooked Timber, here's a neat home-page randomizer plugin. My browser is never closed, and I have no idea what the homepage is set to, but if memory serves Becks recently searched the universe, and her soul, for a fitting home page.
Yeah, where are the art history blogs? When I spoke recently on a panel about art criticism, I asked this question myself (thinking it made a better ripose to new-media enthusiasm than that old saw, which everyone kept offering, about how much better things read when they're on inky fishwrap that you can hold in your hands). JL hazards some answers, most of which are on point. I've given it some thought from a journalistic perspective, but I'm on my way to a press conference, so I'll have to come back to it.
Congratulations to Sarah of Forward Retreat, who just defended her Master's thesis. I'm assuming it was gravy. Here's hoping that academic release means she'll have more time for piddling on the Internet.
You're a smart art reader—you eschew the idea that New York is the end-all and be-all of the art world, much less that the New York Times is its only or best herald. You look to outlets from across the nation for your daily dose of art criticism. At the same time, you're irritated by the sheer volume of entries that overtakes your RSS reader when you subscribe to feeds by media outlets. You appreciate, for example, anything Dan Savage writes, you read about that Zoo documentary that Charles Mudede wrote—but you're reading Slog for Jen Graves's posts. Twenty-nine out of the 30 or so posts that the Seattle Stranger writers put out in a day are of no use to you.
Enter Yahoo Pipes, one very neat new media tool. Last night I created a pipe that feeds to me only Graves's entries, and I think I can jigger it to deliver online versions of her print articles, too. Same for the Boston Globe and Exhibitionist. So easy, I can do it: this walkthrough video will tell you just about everything you need to know.
The holidays are the perfect time to reflect on the contours of one's navel. Courtesy of Sommer, five things you might not know about me:
5. I was a Death Eater. I was more than grouchy about all my friends toting around these tomes about student wizards . . . those delightful, wonderful wizards. I don't remember how I got sucked in, but I do recall chiding my smartie friends about their kid-lit obsessions. (I'm not a tolerant guy, but you knew that already.)
4. I am oboerageous. I play the oboe, the saxophone, and to a much lesser extent, the clarinet. An aggressive summer band camp schedule in my youth even gave me an opportunity to learn the bassoon, but it didn't take. The first thing I'll do with my lotto millions is buy a sportscar. After that, an oboe and a bass clarinet.
3. I voted Green. Only once, and in Texas where it doesn't matter, but I felt awful about it. Tony Sanchez, the Democratic candidate for governor, played a role in my alma mater's decision to pass on a museum design by Herzog and de Mueron, and he needed to be punished.
[Shoot, I mentioned that before.]
3. I am your glorious leader. Christmas is hereby revised to celebrate the birth of the DCeiver.
2. I am prone to seizures. For some time I identified as a card-carrying epileptic, though the cause of my seizures is not traditional. It's under control nowadaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa*
1. I was nearly named Alex.
I'll pass this on to Scuppered and Josie.
A hardy welcome to Free Ride, a new city blog launched by the Express (that's the free daily published by the Washington Post). I'm happy to tell you that I'll be contributing local arts and culture coverage. I'm pleased to join the prolific Mr. Grass and inestimable Metrocurean, who will be writing food and entertainment. I think it's gonna be 'core.
And right out of the gate, there's material that ought to interest readers here: Last night Grass saw starchitect Rem Koolhaas speak at the National Building Museum. You can check out Grass's writeup here. I'd loved to have seen Koolhaas speak, but seats were a little pricey, and I was in Virginia to see my friend Valerie's senior show. (Every once in a while, I break my Virginia travel prohibition. This trip took me to a university in the middle of a forest, where they apparently grow dark-horse basketball teams.) Frankly, I'd like to know whether OMA architects spend as much time in Beijing nowadays as I imagine they do. Anyway—Free Ride launches officially on Monday, but you can take a peak now.
A few items from the other platform:
But I don't know anything about babies.
My roommate doesn't know what Fauvism is. I'm going to buy the new Janson's and beat him with it.
Why not post a few links while I avert mine eyes from the pile of (all my) clothing that's consuming my floor?
Sure, I'll gush about the blogger party that Yglesias and I hosted the other night. Who's too proud? Not me: What with the great Unfogged meatup and the local blogger revue at Tomcat and Charles's, my social life can be pretty quickly summarized through hyperlinks. With regard to this party, in my dual role as host and total fly on the wall, I'm more than happy—obligated, even!—to dish.
On Saturday we feted Kevin Drum, who was in town for the sole purpose of going to parties. 'S a tough life there, K-Drum. So we invited a few people from the East Coast Internets whom he wanted to meet, meaning that we got to meet some of them for the first time, too.
Which also meant that we were obligated to throw an adult party. Now, in the past MY and I have always relied on the fruit of the smoker and the Champagne of Beers for our entertaining puropses, and that always went over well enough. This time around we braved the notorious traffic of north Virginia for two-buck chuck and appetizers from Trader Joe's. Worse still, the Zipcar we rented was a Prius, meaning that—do I have to say it?—we drove a hybrid to buy cheese and wine for a blogger soirée. No no, don't kick my ass—I'll do it myself, thanks. Anyway, despite the fact that our household is manned by persons whose maturity levels effectively taper off somewhere at the post-toddler level, I don't think our spread was half bad. Especially given Sommer's tasty spinach-artichoke dip, mm.
Kevin Drum showed up in a USC sweatshirt, and after I threw him out, the party kicked off in earnest. I have to say, if Topps ever made a trading cards series based on the blogosphere, the people in attendance that evening would make up the limited-edition foil-stamped holograms. Without further ado, my (breathless) party notes:
Typepad's down today, which prevents me from posting to Eye Level, so I thought I'd throw a mention up here that EL is Yahoo!'s Pick of the Day. It's a generous writeup and will probably be making an appearance back in Texas on Mama Capps's refrigerator within the day.
Meanwhile, dusting the cobwebs off the G.p entry screen got me reminiscing about the good ol' days, like last week, when I wrote stuff here. Those were feel-good times. This week it's all about end-of-the-year project madness and holiday party stop and chats and, ought'n I be boojy and start my xmas shopping at some point? But I'm going to break my taboo on weekend blogging to get some stuff on the page—I miss this joint.
Today I had the great good pleasure of gathering with the local Unfogged affiliates for a special site visit from Ogged himself. Townhouse Tavern was filled with cheer as Yglesias, Tom, Ezra, and I met up with Apostropher, Matt F, (hyperlinkless) Michael, and Ogged. Scholars and gentlemen. (A special nod to Apostropher, not only for having the best blog name of anyone, anywhere, but for driving all the way up from Durham for breakfast tacos and beers.)
Internet meetups are supposed to be so awkward until you realize that these guys you're meeting aren't like all the online creeps you hear about, and instead resemble the blog personas you read and cherish. As it turns out, people just do resemble how they write, so friendships made online translate to real life pretty well. The genre of encounters has an undeserved bad name. Meanwhile, in the meatosphere everywhere you go you're always running into strange people who aren't like you and probably don't share your values and may not even have URLs. Meeting strangers, in the human flesh, without a digital trial period? By how—talking at them, for no good reason? No thanks, Morpheus, I'll take the blue pill.
Ogged has a deeper voice than I would have guessed. (If all this is Greek to you . . . read Unfogged daily for 9 months or so.)
Fantastic. Though they missed one of my favorite b-sides: "Hat-tip: So and so."
If I were in New York today, I'd definitely see Maud Newton, Sasha Frere-Jones, and Terry Teachout speak at this panel. But why don't they broadcast it online so I can see it? It's about online criticism, after all; I'm sure the Internet is involved with that in some way.
I'm just returning from a meeting with the Board of Directors for G.p (NYSE: GPDN), and company trends both distressing and positive from the third quarter were the subject for review. From the debits column: It's been so slow lately in part because other projects have required a lot of time. But for the credits: One of those projects seems to be moving right along and even got a mention on MSNBC (scroll a bit). This graph and this chart should provide a comprehensive view of all the third-quarter data for the company; the Directors tell me that early analysis indicates more local reviews coming soon, though one or two might be late, and for that, the Directors very regretfully removed their tophats and begged your pardon. But they're drying their eyes, affixing their monacles, filling their chests with big resolute breaths, and getting back to business, harumph-harumph.
Speaking of the third quarter, it's inarguable that the KissCam is the pinnacle of time-out entertainment. Sure, you'll tell me, people said the same thing about digitally animated concession-stand food products racing around in formula-one cars—who will top that? I didn't think it could be done either, but at last night's Wizards game pals Ian and Valerie popped up on the jumbotron and it became clear to me how awesome it is to join a stadiumful of people in evaluating a couple's kissyface. They did well! On the other hand, the Wizards really need to learn how to pull down the boards.
UPDATE: Did Jamison really double-double with 15 rebounds last night? From the floor it didn't look like there were 15 rebounds among the whole bench.
Any readers from or familiar with the Miami area? I need to change my flight pronto, and I'm trying to figure out if it's reasonably doable to fly into Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International airport and mad dash it to Miami. Is there any sort of shuttle running between the two, or would I need to rent a car?
While I'm ostensibly flying down for this thing, it's currently 35 degrees outside in the District, and my cold-blooded reptilian nature demands a warmer climate.
UPDATE: Mos def, if you have tips about what's to be seen at Basel, send 'em. I have a rough outline of the booths I'll be seeking out, no idea when I'll be where, and vague apprehensions about my lack of accommodations. And I plan to try out the new drink sensation called "the mojito"!
A little doohickey that uses Technorati inputs to determine the value of your blog. Courtesy of (undervalued!) Adrienne Aldredge.
OK, yeah, I'm phoning it in this week. Substantive posts to resume any day now.
Roxanne tagged me with the newest meme. What the hey, I'll bite.
1. Of all the books that you have eventually finished after many starts & stops, which one took you the longest and how long did it eventually take?
I don't think I finished The Silmarillion until my junior year in college, and I probably started that book in junior high. Lots of fits and starts. Same thing with Gravity's Rainbow, which I picked at for over a year until I killed it during a study-abroad program in Italy. If you're looking for a book to sort of not read for long periods of time and eventually put down, I recommend Pynchon—the Tolkien myth is actually good, so long as you're willing to slog through the Molgorth-begat-Orgnaught stuff.
2. What great band (or album or song) have you heard so often, you wouldn't mind never hearing again even though you still think the band (or album or song) is great?
Probably Radiohead.
3. Which cliché or often cited quote needs to be placed in quarantine for a few decades?
"Socially liberal, fiscally conservative" is what people say when they mean, "I have never voted, and in fact hold no opinions about politics whatsoever." Fenceriders, bah!
4. During the 1990s "Compassion Fatigue" received a lot of press, now the media is giddy with "Donation Fatigue". What will be the next trendy fatigue?
Indictment fatigue! We'll be hearing those aches and moans as early as tomorrow from the folks at National Review
5. What percentage of respondents will answer "meme fatigue" to question #4?
I like little time wasters, but man—this one meme a while back was truly terrible. (Nothing meant by linking to The Heretik as an example.) The first question was, "You are stuck in Fahrenheit 451. What book would you be?" or some variation. Doesn't that reference signal that the book is about to be burned? I was ready for these things to disappear at that point.
Okay, kicking off to Jeff G., Jeff N., and Charles.
I'm link poaching from the inestimable Bayes Project, but this item deserves another run:
bloc-notes, n.m.The other items on the vocabulaire de l'internet are pretty pedestrian, but Christ if bloc-notes isn't better than "blogs."Forme abrégée: bloc, n.m.
Domaine: Informatique/Internet.
Définition: Site sur la toile, souvent personnel, présentant en ordre chronologique de courts articles ou notes, généralement accompagnés de liens vers d’autres sites.
Note: La publication de ces notes est généralement facilitée par l’emploi d’un logiciel spécialisé qui met en forme le texte et les illustrations, construit des archives, offre des moyens de recherche et accueille les commentaires d’autres internautes.
Équivalent étranger: blog, web log, weblog.
My roommate and I were talking about the free tickets that Joss Whedon bloggers up with to see Serenity. Wouldn't all the bloggers have seen this movie anyway? And wouldn't they have then blogged about it—just as with Sin City, Batman Begins, Kill Bill, Star Wars II–III, and any other film to which the term "space opera" or a suspect libertarian reading could be applied? I doubt the studio lost much on the ticket giveaway, but I doubt they made much on it either.
But Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know—I bet a blogger outreach would have had a bigger impact for that movie. I saw the movie after Dan and Todd spoke so favorably about it. It was a ducky, charming film, and I mentioned it to three friends, all of whom enjoyed it. Maybe some other people then saw it upon Yglesias's recommendation.
A person who came to the film at that point might not be aware of July's art or necessarily see every Cannes awardwinner—that viewer, I imagine, is a total bonus, being completely outside the likely audience demographic. For a creator with a niche movie she really believes in (I mean really believes, since (to go with our example) a negative review from a Dan or a Todd might be the sort of thing to keep me a given like me at home), kicking out some tickets to some citizen journalists along with the traditional press couldn't hurt.
A happy blogging anniversary to Tyler Green, who's been rustling the art world's feathers since 2001. Congrats!
In comments to this post, someone says that famous Yglesias was nominated Best Lefty Blogger by Playboy magazine. So I ask you, friends, Romans, countrymen—can anyone out there confirm? I won't tell anybody what a perv you are.
If he's been mentioned now in both the Suicide Girls forum and Playboy, I think it's safe to say that my roommate's a porn star.
I hesitated from the start when I heard that the newly launched TPMCafe would be built using Scoop, the collaborative media engine behind Daily Kos. Not a site I frequent for a variety of reasons, the format not the least of which—it's dizzying. TPMCafe, on the other hand, looks great, and even the reader diaries seem reasonably well integrated, though I'm not sure I know the difference between those and the reader blogs yet—anyway, there's a books section that looks promising.
If I were planning to launch a blog that would probably find a large audience pretty quickly but wanted to maintain a cool, moderated comment section, I'd probably give Scoop a close look. . . .
Gregg Chadwick rounds up art blogs from various destinations around the world—Georgia, Finland, Portugal, Tasmania, and (Ess Eff by way of) Norway. Since I'll have reason to visit Georgia soon enough, so I think I'll keep an eye on Hans Heiner Buhr. Thanks, Gregg.
Congratulations to my roommate, who is closing shop at his own blog and opening a new editorial space at Josh Marshall's TPMCafe. Think that involves repainting? Lifting heavy boxes of code? Regardless, may his professional success continue unabated (particularly if it is paired with a financial success that will furnish our home in new and potentially high-definition ways).
(Related—for a while there, it looked as if MY was going to have to come up with a bloggy sort of blog name (like Grammar.police or what have you). Rebranding is tough, especially when the best suggestions your friends will offer is "MY Side of the Story!!" and "Whyglesias.")
And now, it's Friday, and I am just waking up. It's time for lunch. So, I'm going to go have some coffee and a bagel. I'll be back around 3. Then, I'm going to write about this Bolton fucker. After that, I might pop a Xanax and have more sex.Again, SOP around G.p downtown headquarters. I'm a few Metro stops removed from the junior charity circuit but I enjoy Collins's observations on it. And she regularly offers ludicrous amounts of cash for gossip. I do wish I could type the blog address in my browser without writing "washington socialists," which sounds more like my kind of circuit but doesn't exist.
Guest blogger: JL of Modern Kicks
This will probably be my last post here at Grammar.police. I’ll be checking in on comments, of course, and will continue writing at Modern Kicks. I hope you've enjoyed the past week of guest blogging by Dan and I. It's been fun, if a little exhausting, though probably not as much as moving was for Kriston. Writing at what is, certainly by comparison to MK, a prominent site, linked to and read by all sorts of people, has certainly been a change. If nothing else, the experience has given me reason for one week to feel less guilty about clicking on Grammar.police's Sitemeter button. And since traffic has not shown a complete collapse over the past several days, I'll chose to believe we've done ok, or at least that the worn rut of readers' web habits has not been totally eroded by Kriston’s absence.
It's my duty, however, to announce that guest blogging is now over. And I mean totally over, like Roy Orbison hitting the high note at the end of "It's Over" over.
Sure, I know, people will continue to do it – they’re doing it right now, even. But it was over the moment Kriston announced Dan and I were to be posting here, or, at the latest, when our first pieces ran. Let me explain. Like many of you, I've been reading blogs for several years now. But I only started writing one last year, summer of 2004. That’s right, just as the election campaign was heating up and everyone was going on and on about blogs, what they were, and how they were changing everything, man. That is to say, I started doing this at more or less the exact moment it was over. This was not a new experience for me. For instance, when did I finally decide I thought R.E.M. was a pretty good band and I should buy their next record? Right before Fables of the Reconstruction came out. Yup: over. If you’ll forgive a metaphor bent to the breaking point, you could say that I have the gift of boarding trains that have left the station. So I think we can feel pretty certain now as we wrap up this exercise that the role of guest blogger is done with as well. Any role that was once a novel thing, was later taken up by Harry Shearer, and then I performed? That is the definition of over.
So while I’m still here let me use this forum to complain a little (the one thing that's never over on a blog.) What was especially galling about starting a site just as the phenomenon was over was how well situated I had been to ride the wave. You see, I spent part of 2002 and essentially all of 2003 unemployed. There I was, lying in bed until noon, only rising to surf the web and wash handfuls of Cheetos down with gin, warm water, and sugar far into the early morning hours - was I not the very epitome of a blogger? The plan should have been to put the blogging game in a chokehold. Yet all I did was sit there, thinking things like "that Drum guy is so darned reasonable!" or "how can that economics professor get away with half the time just reproducing someone else's entire post with a link attached?"
When I did start a site, I realized a few things, aside from the sheer overness of what I was doing. The first was that I felt like a total fraud writing about politics, even though, or perhaps because, once upon a time that was my chosen field of work. So I mostly stopped. I also realized that part of what it meant for blogging to be over was that no one needed my thoughts on politics anyway (or on anything else, for that matter, but let's stick to business here.) I’m extremely proud of bringing to you all Bunny’s analysis of the British elections – more so of that than anything else I’ve done online. But let’s face it: I’m not capable of something of that quality. And no one needs what I am capable of – another post by some jackass saying "I disagree with Ezra when he writes . . ." or "The Editors are great! (well, except for that period after the election when they totally lost their shit, quite understandable, really, and they're better now, anyway.)" No one needed that at all. Finally, I realized something I had forgotten about why I was unemployed: I absolutely hate writing. Remembering that cut my ambition down to size.
But I kept plodding along, moving steadily in the direction of art/culture writing of a very informal kind. I hope I don't have to point out that this is now oh-so-very over. It's been rewarding, after a fashion (i.e., no actual rewards), doing it interests me, some of the time, and it helps keep the mental self-reproachment ("fraud! loser!") to a relative minimum. Enough people care about art to make the conversations interesting, but not so many that doing this feels like it could spin out of control. If you've enjoyed the posts I've offered here, feel free to stop by Modern Kicks anytime, there'll be more. Probably. In any event, thanks once again to Kriston for letting me help fill in along with Dan, and to all those who keep reading along. I'm also especially grateful for the emailed press releases from DC galleries that I'll now be receiving until the end of time. Every time I see one of those in my mailbox, I'll think of the time I spent here with you. And then I’ll hit delete.
Guest blogger: Dan of Iconoduel
Picking up where Kriston left off a week ago: someone's back from her honeymoon.
Brief note—congratulations to Sarah!
Julian hits me with the new blog game. And it's invitation only! Here's the deal:
Behold, the Caesar’s Bath meme! List five things that people in your circle of friends or peer group are wild about, but you can’t really understand the fuss over. To use the words of Caesar (from History of the World Part I), “Nice. Nice. Not thrilling . . . but nice.”Sounds good. In no particular order:
Dan Hopewell excerpts from an issue of October to prove that art theory is not a coup orchestrated by Rosalind Krauss, despite what any number of art writers will have you believe. The October piece, by Yve-Alain Bois, concerns Barnett Newman (PDF). Not only is it a worthwhile essay, it's not even theory per se. I don't understood the substantive complaint of October's critics, who dismiss the journal (interchangeable with "theory," often) whole-cloth, and here's hoping that the sight of a representative article laid bare on the Internets, naked as day for all the world to see, will compel some naysayers to argue with citations—Dan upped the ante for this blog debate and that's good. Todd Gibson's take on Michael Fried's reading of Thomas Demand ought to serve as an example of a principled refutation of an art theorist.
I won't comment on Art Since 1990: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism—"the October vision of a century of art," as Dan puts it—except to say that, if the hostile sentiment expressed by Frank Whitford for the LAT is the best that can be summoned, the book must be very good. Whitford's gripes about pomo language (a worn-out dartboard if ever there was one) are especially feeble—the language he cites is perfectly tolerable.
Since language is the nut of the pro-connoisseurship and pro–opinion criticism crowds' complaints—you know, about how when art theorists say that art "interrogates" something, etc.—a defense is merited. I might just be more tolerant of the language than others, but nevertheless: Taking Meyer Schapiro's formal definition of art history ("the language of experience of forms"), Hippolyte Taine's positivistic definition of art ("la race, le milieu, et le moment"), and Roland Barthes's "The Death of the Author" thesis, I might say that I have three theoretical vantage points with few intersections. Common to them all, though, is a philological practice. Theory requires rock-bottom syntactic accuracy, industry terms are necessary for dialogue across genres and theories, etc.—so, sure, language comes up that wouldn't appear in a shopping list. Same for the law, same for literary theory. It doesn't exclude Peter Schjeldahl from the conversation by any means to observe that his use of poetic terms (e.g., "beautiful") would be enormously problematic—that's, like, aethetics Ground Zero. On the other hands, it's not as if Rosalind Krauss is publishing her studies in the New Yorker. And I think that Schjeldahl's poetics and Barthes's investigation are both significant resources for an art critic. I guess I'm not seeing the problem with the clerics do ing their thing and the critics doing something different, unless it's a Roger Kimball–type complaint that liberal universities are turning co-eds into Commie pomo zombies, a point that I don't think is cause for concern (or empirically valid) to begin with.
Sincere apologies for the post title; I couldn't resist.
There's frankly nothing not funny about this. Sublime. Superb. No one needs to ever bother with mocking Michelle Malkin again—she has been reduced. Note that she exposes the deeply unserious Vincent Van Gogh for the emo moonbat that he is.
Open a tip jar, Roxanne!
Greg beat me to the good jokes, but this is really the funniest thing anyone's ever tried to pass off in the name of fearmongering. Your favorite scarecrow and mine, Michelle Malkin:
Actresses Angelina Jolie and Christina Ricci did it. So did Courtney Love and the late Princess Diana. . . . The destructive practice has been depicted in films targeting young girls and teens (such as "Thirteen"). There is even a new genre of music—"emo"—associated with promoting the cutting culture.Oh, that kills me—that slays me. If I think about it, I can get worked up about Malkin calling a severe impulse control disorder a "new teen craze," but I'm just not sure I can get beyond that emo business.
These guys will surely play The Promise Ring in the series of Oxygen and Lifetime cutting dramas that Malkin no doubt launched with this column. Hide your daughters! And what about Sunny Day Real Estate? So bad.
My dog could eat Joshua Micah Marshall's dog. What a weiner!
I was looking over the ArtsJournal's new book blog, Beatrix, written by Ron Hogan of (naturally enough) beatrice.com, and I noticed that Hogan doesn't link to the usual bookstore suspects. All his generic book links run through Powell's Books. The good people at Bookslut don't seem to mind Amazon, if they've put any thought toward it.
An admittedly mundane observation that struck me because I picked up some interesting bookstore trivia recently: After Ayatollah Khomeni pronounced fatwa on Salman Rushdie following the publication of Satanic Verses, Canada's Coles Books and the U.S.'s B. Dalton Booksellers (Barnes & Noble) and the Borders Group (Borders, Waldenbooks), among others, pulled Verses from the shelves. Say what you will about decentralized bookstores, but short of a DNS attack, I don't see how the Islamofascists can get to them. Amazon's political involvements, however, leave much to be desired for liberals (and libertarians, for that matter).
Powell's sounds like the way to go for booklinking, and I'll adjust my recs in the sidebar. But for my money you can't beat Kramerbooks in the District, which resists the militant fundementalist threat whether it comes in the form of Islamist dictum or independent counsel overreach. And they serve Shiner.
UPDATE: Doubleday has announced that it will publish the Al Qaeda Reader, a collection of translated writings by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. And you thought the right got angry when people didn't say Merry Christmas enough. . . .
Everything you need to know about 24, freepers, and "Mooselimbs," tidily explained by The Poor Man. The Internet is a vastly entertaining place.
Overread, anyway—I found this comment on a discussion about painting. No link so as not to embarrass, but this strikes me as hilarious:
Pardon my romantic comment, I just turned 23.Indeed.
Over at Begging To Differ, we're trying something new—to go with the total site redesign, we've added a forum. I'm not terribly familiar with these things, but already this one is my favorite forum because I am a 5-star admin. That may be the most authority I've ever been granted. So head over and start a thread—over the few hours it's been open, two dozen members have already joined, so I don't think it will be wanting for conversation. But remember: at any moment, I could delete your thoughts. My fingertips tremble with the awesome power.
Sean at blogging.la says that he has it on authority that LACMA is specifically blocking its employees from accessing art blogs. One LACMA employee wrote to me a while back to tell me that my site was being flagged as "containing pornography." Sean says that other employees are being told that the firewall is in place to prevent viruses from being downloaded via visiting certain Web sites (?); my confidant says that certain art blogs are being blocked while others are permitted.
Now, I don't know how the Internets work, but it seems to me that an art blog–specific blacklist is possibly not the most plausible explanation for what's happening. At the very least, it would take some effort on behalf of the employer to specifically ban art blog IP addresses, an effort that sounds likely if LACMA is willing to reinstate blogs upon employee request (as Sean describes). That's just my guess—I obviously don't know. Regardless, I can't imagine that these employees are eager to admit to surfing the art blogosphere on the company dime without an offer of amnesty. So if someone else sends LACMA a list of inadvertently offending IP addresses, would they object to rehabilitating them?
The end-of-year blah-blah-blah, in a more or less top-ten format, behind the cut. See you in ought-five.
Minimalism. From the bicoastal celebrations to the exceptional and comprehensive Dan Flavin retrospective, minimalism ruled 2004. The year also marked the deaths of Agnes Martin and Anne Truitt, losses that Miguel Sánchez aptly described as feeling "like a door slamming shut."
The Atlantic Monthly. The transformation of The Atlantic Monthly from a journal of letters comparable in scope to Harper's to a magazine of note in political affairs may better qualify for a previous year's review. It was editor Michael Kelly who set these efforts in motion before his early passing in April 2003. The new format saw its full fruition in this year—from its remarkable letters-to-the-editor section to issue after issue of relevant reads by a core ensemble of James Fallows, Caitlin Flanagan, Ken Pollack, Christina Nehring, and Mark Bowden, this is the single magazine I'd like delivered to my deserted island.
Philip Roth, The Plot Against America. It is not by any stretch Roth's strongest novel. But it is an excellent meditation on the bifabricated nature of political observation: that any one event (or administration) in America can spur two interpretations that are not only distinct but bear no common factual intersection. By the end of the novel, liberals will decry the fascistic policies of the Lindbergh administration, and neocons will see yet another instance of liberal paranoia expressed among the hate-America-first crowd as an eagerness to describe national security policies as nascent Nazism. Sound familiar?
Abraham the Patriarch. I'd say that Jesus Christ made gains in America during ought-four, and Mohammed certainly kept his ground elsewhere. But isn't it Abraham whose status is continually emphasized by religious politics and strife throughout the world? A significant global player, Abraham. All indicators show another big year for him in 2005.
John Currin. Some time ago, I saw Martin Amis speak on a book tour, and the question was raised to him regarding the direction of literature in the wake of postmodernism. Amis's answer struck me as weak and safe: that literature would return to its storytelling roots. There's an unfortunate assumption that art moves epicyclically, venturing forth in periods of experimentation but always doubling back to a home-plate style, be it representational painting or traditional literary narrative. Movements change, but art never moves in this way.
That was the sentiment I identified in Jerry Saltz's passing comment on John Currin: "I hope never to hear the following oft repeated, mind-numbing inanity again, whether it's applied to John Currin, Paul P., Tim Gardner, Delia Brown, Graham Little or whoever: 'They have such skill.'" I appreciate Currin and I like the renewed interest and emphasis on representation and painting, but emphatically not because I think it signifies a resurgence in craftsmanship after a wacky period of anything-goes art. But that's the debate, and whatever your opinion of (to quote Kim Levin) "our premier mannerist," Currin has to be acknowledged as figuring heavily in that conversation.
Hollywood Agendas. Fahrenheit 911 versus The Passion of the Christ. Your local cinema megaplex henceforth became the biggest megaphone of them all.
Sexy Art. Walter Robinson:
As for the guys, well, they like women, too. Funky fashion photog Terry Richardson took the art world by storm with a show at Deitch Projects of sex pictures that gave new license to the notion of licentiousness. Lower East Side erotic auteur Richard Kern, with his new kinky photos at Feature Inc., managed to point his camera down the blouse and up the skirt in the same picture. And Timothy Greenfield-Sanders introduced hard-core porn stars to polite society with his color portrait photographs at Mary Boone Gallery in Chelsea. “Art in New York is obsessed with sex!” said German critic Barbara Weidle, after a month-long stint in the Artnet offices.Is it poor form to quote someone else's year-end review in your own?But the most radical artistic gesture of all -- and curiously, the most trivial -- belonged to Andrea Fraser, the “institutional critique” artist whose video at Fredrich Petzel Gallery chronicled a special kind of performance -- her having sex with a collector, reportedly for $20,000. In the end, Simone de Beauvoir was right -- “woman is sex.” Complain about chauvinism all you like, this kind of thing still represents eros, the life force, the one universal positive.
Dark Horses. From the awarding of the Pritzker Prize to Zaha Hadid to the entire list of candidates for the National Book Award. Only Bill Murray bucked the trend.
Post-Soviet Revolutions. From the Rose Revolution in Georgia to the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the palette of 2004 was decidedly post-Red. (Here's hoping for a burnt orange victory tomorrow in the Rose Bowl to kick off a similar trend in 2005.)
The Cicadas. Which comes last because they swarmed so few regions, but if you missed out on Brood X, you really missed out on quite a phenomenon.
. . . and all of you. OK, so I'm out of pithy observations for the year. Truth be told, I think there's probably something to the claim that 2004 will come to be seen as the golden age of the blogosphere. (I'm thinking that even my parents will have one by this time next year.) But the internets have been a fun place this year and will still be so tomorrow, I hope. Thanks for stopping by and have some safe fun tonight.
