1. Philip Kennicott’s piece in today’s Washington Post about what the gilt frame around Zarqawi’s dead head at yesterday’s press conference means. I love it when arts writer Kennicott does work like this, reading the larger culture instead of sticking only to symbols (artistic) that ask to be read. An excerpt:

Zarqawi is gone and good riddance. But there’s nothing in the image of his face that deserves a frame. It’s a small thing, to be sure. But it suggests a cynicism about this war that is profoundly distressing. Our political and military leaders simply can’t resist packaging the war and wrapping it up in a bow.

2. Looks like Jeff Koons’s next subject is The Incredible Hulk. I’m still not sure what to make of Koons—plenty of critics I admire (Jerry Saltz above all) are champions of Koons, but he often rubs me the wrong way. His overwhelming success in the market does, too: When Tobias Meyer was here at EMP on Tuesday, he showed a slide of Koons’ vacuums (which, admittedly, are among his very best works). They sold for $4.7 million in May. Meyer said, “Very few people don’t see it’s genius,” as the EMP audience shifted and almost audibly groaned. “Koons is one of the great artists, next to Warhol and Picasso,” Meyer continued, informing the unwashed Seattleites. “Up to a few years ago, some people would have disagreed with me, but now, nobody disagrees about this.” What he meant was, nobody of importance. Even though I love this work, I couldn’t help but grimace at the speech.

3. The Thinker/Laborer split brought up by the New York Times May 7 article, which I wrote about here, is really getting bloggers and their commenters talking. Today I learned of two more takes on it, at leisurearts (“We’ve always wondered how a supposedly theoretically savvy art world can still cling to the mind/body lacuna” despite its political, feminist, and cognitive problematics) and from Deborah Fisher, who has begun reworking a definition of craft and proposing a category of artists called MakerThinkers, including Bruce Nauman, Chris Burden, Marina Abramovic, Dan Graham. In fact, her invocation of a lot of ’70s performance-based stuff is intriguing, since it is hardly associated with craft, but is definitely associated with an awareness about production rather than a denial of production.

And just for kicks, here’s an image. It’s Koons’ New Hoover Deluxe Shampoo Polishers from 1980.