The most remarkable part is that Prince's voice cuts out before he can say "creep" at any point during the song. The man is constitutionally incapable of making a self-derogatory claim, so he can't actually bring himself to sing the lyrics, "I'm a creep." Loud and clear on the perfect body line, though.

Nevertheless, as Hillary Clinton so lawyerly put it, they broke the tie in Indiana tonight. She canceled her talk show appearances for the morning—indeed, all her public appearances for the day—and her campaign asks the commentariot to take a deep breath and not rush Sen. Clinton. I don't think there's any worry on that score. This week and next week promise a leisurely parade of superdelegates announcing for Obama to the drumbeat of media outlets recognizing Obama as the Democratic nominee.

Everyone who prognosticated that nothing changed tonight got the election basically right: Though it seems at this hour that Obama wins Indiana by a hair, it doesn't make for a substantial improvement in allocated delegates over the small number that Clinton was predicted to net. Obama won North Carolina like he was supposed to.

The thing that changed was that Clinton dropped the front-runner façade. She couldn't maintain it. She declared the victory she could, furiously backpedaling on the meaning of the contest and canceling her next steps. Oh, and it looks as though she loaned her campaign money to get to this point—and this performance isn't going to make the crowds throw money. She even said that she would work for the Democratic nominee, no matter the results.

What about this signal is going to convince a majority of undecided superdelegates who, for whatever reason, have all along abstained from pledging their support to the candidate?

She'll have the time she needs to tour West Virginia and Kentucky and work out the post-active phase of her campaign; no one will rush her through that. But Barack Obama will be named the Democratic nominee for President.

I in fact believe that support for the Artist-Museum Partnership Act and tax-code revisions to bolster fractional giving can probably wait until day 90 or so. But those are concerns that I'd like to see the next President address.

Related info, in blessed non-vlog format: Obama on the arts.

When I told him that the city wouldn't deliver recycling cans even though I've asked for them twice (confirmation number: 1692544), he said that the city in fact would not be giving us more cans for trash or recycling because—hang on—we residents of the Flophouse number five and that marks our house as a commercial property.

Then, to truly break our house's spirit, the guy made me move all the trash bags that the city pledges not to collect five feet to the right so they were centered in front of our house. Filth, we can live in—but indignity??

UPDATE: DCist says it was merely an explosion triggered by a group called the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which is drilling deep into the Earth's core. Nothing to worry about there!

UPDATE II: It was an earthquake! So to add to the snowy winters, the District now has earthquakes. But what, then, is this NGIA up to?

UPDATE III: Wrecky? Didn't even so much as try to tug my sleeve to warn me that an earthquake was imminent. No use!

Maybe you like one of Lacie's other designs better?

Gió Pomodoro, Forma distesa, 1963–4.

The proximate cause for my dismissal was a letter to the editor, which the paper forwarded to me two weeks ago. In the letter, a reader asked for a correction with regard to something I'd written for the best-of issue. An April correction would have meant back-to-back corrections for articles I'd written. (In March, I wrote that the "Collectors Select" exhibit at Arlington Arts Center showcased the efforts of five curators. There were in fact six/seven: five collectors and one husband-and-wife collector team, all of whom I discussed in the piece.)

I stood behind what I'd written in the April issue and protested the correction. A subsequent investigation (including two interviews with persons involved in the story) conducted by editor-in-chief Erik Wemple proved me right. No correction was run.

But vindication did not change the fact of the matter: It's time that the paper and I part ways. I've enjoyed working with Mark Athitakis and Matt Borlik and my work has benefited from their editing. I won't talk out of turn so I'll just say that I'm proud of the reporting and criticism I've written on the city's visual art scene for the last two years.

No doubt, I'll continue writing about District gallery shows, primarily in art magazines. Reviews for April/May shows will hit newsstands in a couple months and I'll let you know when they pop up online. Other reporting and opinion-y stuff will appear elsewhere. So keep reading.

Jen Graves in the Stranger has some posts about the gift that Washington (state) received.

One image that's stayed with me since the art fairs last December? Sam Taylor-Wood's That White Rush.

Taylor-Wood, who is known for her photography, gives her medium a gentle tweak and winds up with one of the best video artworks I've seen in a fortnight. Taylor-Wood pictures the tryst between Leda and the Swan through a grainy video loop that plays at only a few frames per second.

Her take is both comic and earnest, acknowledging the absurdity of the visual: the nude woman reclines, propped up by her hands, and receives the ministrations of the taxidermied waterfowl, its wings fanned wide. Enhancing a comic effect is the low-fi porn production, which signals to the viewer that the perversion of the gods is best understood through the lens of the celebrity sex-tape. Taylor-Wood diminishes the deception of Zeus and the corruption of Leda as two very distinct effects within the myth. Instead, she focuses on the sex and how it acts as an equalizer—it just looks silly, silly in the way that only sex can, even sex between a mortal and a god.

Yet the scene and setting offer a stark contradiction to the porny production: no hotel mattress illuminated by lime-light night-vision, but instead stark wood floors bathed in wan sunlight. The set is ascetic, signifying revelation or ecstasy or their possibility. It's the same wood paneling favored by Anselm Keifer, who also investigates the divine, visitation, and the supernatural manifested in the real world. In Parsifal III, for example, Keifer depicts a wooden attic—a space invested with significance after the Holocaust and one that appears frequently in his work about heaven and earth. [For more Kiefer, click-click.]

Anselm Keifer, Quaternity, 1973.

Taylor-Wood's video painting takes its name from Yeats's 1922–23 poem, one of the myth's greatest depictions (and one of the poet's greatest poems):

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,

So mastered by the brute blood of the air
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Copy after Michaelangelo, Leda and the Swan, 1530s.

Cy Twombly, Leda and the Swan, 1962.

Click to enlarge.

As in Yeats's characterization, Taylor-Wood has captured Leda in consensual contradiction: receptive, cautious, stimulated, curious. Yeats described Leda as resisting the swan with mere "terrified vague fingers", casting doubt as to whether she even put forth that much effort. Taylor-Wood has simulated that doubt in stilted frame captures—the breast caught heaving, the thigh caught shifting.

Yeats's poem breaks neatly into two halves, with action initiating the octave and climax resolving into sestet. In Taylor-Wood's piece we witness the moment suspended between "a sudden blow" and "a shuddering in the loins"; she has elected to promote perspective as the narrative insight. And in so doing she keys into Yeats's great, telescopic bound from myth to history: A shudder in the loins engenders there/ The broken wall, the burning roof and tower/ And Agamemnon dead.

Although the work is video, That White Rush doesn't capture the sort of context needed to assess what's happening between Leda and the swan. That ambiguity has always driven both the myth and its depictions. Photography and especially video are supposed to dispel ambiguity, and Taylor-Wood is certainly attentive to this idea. Her work is a religious painting caught on security camera. The momentary glimpse of sex (the nip-slip, the up-skirt cam) is a totem for sex, sexuality, and consent.

Art history provides two great precedents for Taylor-Wood's version. Michaelangelo's 1530-ish composition features important Mannerist tendencies. Leda's elongated, curling fingers, for example, give lie to the notion that she is asleep, suggesting permission. Michaelangelo could be a rather dirty old man, and he's reduced the act of penetration into two ambiguous details: the swan's tail meeting with a conspicuous fold of red drapery underneath Leda's bottom, and the swan's beak entering Leda's mouth rather than trained on her nape. And here for the first time (I believe), Leda is depicted in (welcome?) supine repose.

Cy Twombly's far more recent abstraction obviously involves a great degree of ambiguity as far as figure is concerned. The square window form is the anchor to the real, granting the architectural space of this mythical moment unexpected prominence. Taylor-Wood's piece reverses the configuration: the action is unexpectedly graphic, but the space is mysterious.

Leda and the swan as a motif? A welcome throwback. Not only is it one of art history's favorite myths, but confident dialog between contemporary art and a long art history is simply a relief in comparison to often confrontational appropriation tactics favored by would-be dragonslayers and debutantes. Taylor-Wood is not only pinging the canon but, doubly boldly, saluting Bill Viola, her contemporary, so well known for capturing the ecstatic in slow-to-unfold video works. To do so with a nod to Yeats and others? An unexpected achievement.

Tyler Green writes in Portfolio that Christie's will try its hand at selling at auction Richard Neutra's 1946 Kaufmann House. Sometimes called the Kaufmann Desert House, the modest Modernist resort in Palm Springs, California, was restored in the 1990s to its original design. A detail from Green's article:

Crosby Doe, a Los Angeles-based real estate agent who specializes in properties by prominent architects, says that the market for California midcentury Modern architects such as John Lautner, Pierre Koenig, R.M. Schindler, and Neutra is booming. "I liken it to the stock market," says Doe. "When the real estate market is bad, these are the blue chips that people still go out and buy."

Novel or not, architecture's entry into the high-water mark world of arts and luxuries auctions should steer emphasis toward provenance and original designs. No additions by Barry Manilow after the original owner leaves. This is a good sign for architecture preservationists.

There's a comical panel in Amazing Fantasy #15 in which the authors essentially beg the reader to take a chance on this Spider-Man creation they're testing out. Check it out at the Library of Congress blog, where it's announced that an anonymous donor just gave the library Steve Ditko's original art for that issue.

(via cath)

It only occurred to me this morning to dial up Yale's art and art history journal to see whether it had anything to say about the matter. A quick look at the Dimensions blog finds students who, as you might expect, would like to steer the debate toward context. Interestingly enough, on the Dimensions contact page is an image of a sculpture by Shvarts, the materials of which are plaster, vaseline, towels, rubber bands, and latex gloves. That would seem to suggest thematic continuity in the artist's work, the possibility of which her critics, the Crimson included, have dismissed. But who can say? The work will not be seen, not even by her fellow students, who lament, "[s]ince we'll never see it, we'll never know what she really did, or even what she intended to install, and that is the biggest ambiguity of all."