Specifically, the amount is $112,214 to 77 Washington artists working on projects in literary, performing, media, and visual arts.

It was Artist Trust's 20th-anniversary year, and it raised more than expected at the annual auction. The spoils go to artists.

Here's the whole list of money-winners.

A few months ago, Aqua Art Miami announced it will be doubling its franchise. Now we know the details.

The original Aqua Art Miami, invented two years ago by Seattle gallerists and artists Jaq Chartier and Dirk Park, is still happening at its usual location--the charming Aqua Hotel in South Beach, where the courtyard hot tub gets packed with artists at night.

But in addition to Aqua Art Miami, across the water from it, will be Aqua Wynwood. Aqua has taken a five-year lease on a 28,000-square-foot warehouse just south of the Rubell Collection at 42 N.E. 25th St. In addition to the 44 galleries that will show art at the hotel, the warehouse has booths for about 45 galleries, and the booths range in size from 200 square feet to 850 square feet.

Park says the largest booths, designed to give galleries more room to show their art, are larger than any other spaces in Miami during the December art-fair crush, except for the booths at the mother of them all, Art Basel Miami Beach held at the city's convention center.

Aqua Wynwood provides an upscale option (the price, at 40 dollars per square foot, is much higher than at the hotel) for galleries that don't want to show in the cramped and hot hotel rooms.

Because Aqua has the lease on the warehouse year-round and not just in December, it can control the layout of the booths and their design. The walls will be sheetrock, not temporary. Most galleries will have four walls instead of only three. Dark video spaces are possible. The booths of Aqua Wynwood will be "comparable to a programmable gallery space anywhere," Park says.

A 5,000-square-foot parking lot will be transformed into a courtyard with a bar and cafe. The chief design concept for the whole project? Comfort, Park says.

Aqua Wynwood, which is invitation-only, is half-booked, Park said. "We're not trying to press the sales on this thing," he says. "We want people to look at their options and make a decision."

Originally, he was concerned that the hotel fair would lose its better galleries to Aqua Wynwood, but "the hotel has its advocates," he says. It's also more affordable. "Galleries that we honestly expected to move on over to the booth fair have said, 'Nope, I want one more year at the hotel.'"

Seattle galleries remaining at the hotel are Howard House, Platform Gallery, Roq La Rue, and G. Gibson Gallery.

Moving to Aqua Wynwood are Greg Kucera Gallery, James Harris Gallery, and Lawrimore Project.

Expect announcements in the weeks to come if Aqua Wynwood can score any major galleries, or steal any away from the more established secondary fairs NADA and Pulse.

This was going to be a post about the worst vacation I've ever had in New York City; the hazards of falling for people electronically; the power of great art to lift you out of yourself, especially when you're feeling unbelievably shitty for traveling clear out to New York City to see someone you haven't spent much in-person time with; and men's calves. But most of that is none of your business.

So let's just focus on the calves. I mean, look at them. Has there ever been a better depiction of men's calves in the history of art? (Anything come to mind, Jen?) This guy stopped me cold on a sad night at MoMA. (MoMA stays open until 9 pm on Thursdays all summer.) He is The Bather, brought into this world by Cézanne in 1885-1887.

I just showed this guy to Jen Graves and asked her to free associate. "This is a painting about paint." And also: "The thing that Cézanne's known for is the heaviness of the objects. An apple weighs a hundred pounds. A person weighs a ton." Wikipedia will tell you all about Cézanne as the bridge from Impressionism to Cubism. None of these things really occurred to me as I was standing there, looking at it, next to some strangers. My thoughts were more like: Calves! What a shape they are!

I was starving, and MoMA lets you re-enter as much as you want, so I went outside to buy a hot dog from a hot dog stand, only it was late enough that I had to walk a ways to find a hot dog stand that still had hot dogs. On the way, I walked behind these three Eastern European guys with six excellent calves.

Ate, got rained on, went back in side, saw the Richard Serra show--unbelievably great, especially the huge, slightly oxidized metal ribbons that you walk along as they turn in and out, presenting a constantly unfurling vertical horizon (nice to be so far from home and be confronted with a piece literally about perspective)--and as I was leaving MoMA, passed a bank of brochures. One of them was a membership brochure. Lo and behold:

Then, two days ago--clearly still obsessed--I took a long walk to Lake Washington, and for a couple blocks walking through the Central District ended up behind a guy listening to his iPod and carrying a bike helmet. I snapped this shot.

I call it The Biker.

^{White Girl by Rashid Johnson (2007)}

Rashid Johnson's nude at James Harris Gallery this month (review coming up in this week's edition) is called White Girl, which in itself is a pretty terrific art-historical joke.

But she reverses tradition in another way that's so obvious, you can overlook it.

These are the most famous and influential reclining nudes in art history.

^{Sleeping Venus by Giorgione (ca. 1507)}

^{Venus of Urbino by Titian (ca. 1538)}

^{Grand Odalisque by Ingres (1814)}

^{Olympia by Manet (1863)}

^{Blue Reclining Nude by Matisse (ca. 1928)}

Here's the exception at that level of fame, but the mirror device turns her around in your mind anyway:

^{The Rokeby Venus by Velazquez (1647-51)}

Last Thursday, I was invited to take part in a conversation on KUOW about art and politics. The same day, The Art Newspaper reported a story called "Can US museums help win the war on terror?" (thank you, ArtsJournal). It's about a new program from the US State Department (in conjunction with the American Association of Museum) that will fund museums that promote US foreign policy.

Some Picasso etchings were stolen from a Bellevue gallery last week, and the P-I is all over it. Embedded in their story about the robbery last week, they had a slide-scroll pentaptych--four surveillance images and a police sketch--of the woman who police say distracted a gallery employee while her two cronies came in and lifted the works off the wall. Small version (so it fits here):

And here's a sextaptych (can that please be a word?) of the cronies in action:

(Follow this link and you can see these better.)

Meanwhile, P-I art critic Regina Hackett, over on her blog, has the tip that the lady in the sketch might have shown up at Howard House. "Howard said he recognized the alleged culprit from the police sketch in the P-I."

Seattle Times did a story too, but it lacked slide-scroll polyptychs, the info the P-I about how much similar pieces had recently sold for, etc. And does the Seattle Times even have an art blog? I just spent a couple minutes on their site and can't find one.

(Unrelated, from the archives: Remember this local art heist?)

From Eric F, the ID of the Kringen:

hannon Kringen is the Goddess Kring, a public access channel feature of the 90s (and maybe still today?)

She's an insane somewhat zaftig hippie who talked about herself while staring into the camera, then took off her clothes and danced. She signed up for every open slot on the channel's schedule, so she was on all the time.

And from Spencer Moody, a detail from the painting of said Goddess:

From Wired: The Etch-A-Sketch went on sale.

Yesterday I spent running from one gallery to another, finding.

12:30 pm.

Francine Seders Gallery: Print Invitational

Group show, 11 artists, prints everywhere.
Surprise find: Anna McKee, an eloquent urban romantic in the tradition of pictorialist photography. Listen to McKee, Bonnie Lebesch, and Emily Gherard talk at the gallery Tuesday night (the 17th) from 6-8 pm.

These are by McKee (I love the filmic nostalgia of the top half of the second one):

And this, by Emily Gherard, is like a goth representation of Lead Pencil Studio's Maryhill Double.

1:30 pm.

OKOK Gallery: Installation underway on Gregory Euclide's I Have Been Remembering: Half Lives & Half Truths

At one point yesterday, there was a full vodka bottle and a hypodermic needle in the gallery's front window. All for art, man. Euclide used the vodka bottle to collect water at Puget Sound, and he was using the needle to inject single bubble-wrap bubbles with that water--and with tap water and puddle water. The bubbles are mounted on the window first in rows, then injected from the top.

OKOK has a great space--about 1,800 square feet--and because of it and thanks to the imagination of its owners, Charlie and Amanda Kitchings, this is the first time that Euclide, a Minneapolis artist, has taken over an entire gallery to make an installation. For it, the painter cut out tiny, one-inch-diameter circles of paper, painted tiny imaginary landscapes on them, and then adhered a bubble-wrap bubble to each one, so they're seen through the bubble. Seven hundred of those tiny paintings are lined up in parallel rows on the walls that run in rivulets onto the floor. So at the opening Saturday night from 6-10 pm, you'll have to watch where you step.

In addition to those, Euclide made an installation that's basically a storm of paper. On one long sheet, he made a painting of a 360-degree view from the gallery's door (sent to him in photographs). As he often does, he washed the painting with water after painting it, so it's mostly an aftereffect of itself. The paper is cut into squares; a pile of them on the floor are backed with stamp adhesive. The artist wants people to take them and attach them all over the city.

Since the show doesn't open until Saturday, there aren't images of it yet, but I'm going to attach the invite image so you get a sense of what the tiny bubble paintings are like. They're for sale individually, and every time one is sold, a marker with the date will go up in its place, so the unspecific little landscapes will be replaced by the chronological facts of their disappearance, changing the installation with time.

Euclide's traditional larger paintings are up, too. Here's a sense of his painting sensibility from an earlier installation:

A detail from that:

The opening Saturday will include a sound component by Son of Rose. And in the future, OKOK is doing some cool stuff, including chefs working with artists on pre-opening night meals. Stay tuned to this gallery (showing five contemporary artists on portraiture in August).

3 pm.

Crawl Space Gallery: Diana Falchuk: Sweet Remains

Diana Falchuck (she of the I Love the USPS mailboxes project) works with what she calls "dead food."

She goes to the grocery store, buys food, and lives with it for months, drying it and experimenting with it to create sculptures that have something in common both with Justin Gibbens's adorable-scientific drawings of affable mutants and Jim Rittimann's gory-gorgeous reanimated insects. (She also makes imaginative drawings that bring to mind Susan Robb, but they're on mylar and hard to reproduce.)

Falchuk is better known for her work postering utility poles and affectionately washing mailboxes, but she has been semi-secretly working with "dead food" for years in her apartment. It's no wonder the sculptures feel so intimate, even loved.

This weekend is your last chance to see the show; it's open noon to 5 Saturday and Sunday.

(lemon, moss, and pink bumps from the bottoms of slippers)

(carrot and pins)

(sewn plum, salt)

4:20 pm.

The Anne Bonny (named after the lady pirate): The Theme is No Theme

Spencer Moody's new store for art, home accoutrements, and dead people's furniture is terrific. (Please don't buy the golden chair before this weekend so I can still pick it up.) Upstairs is the gallery.

The standout in the current group show is a giant pink painting. Before I look at it, I'm drawn to the handwritten note on the pink table on the floor. It says:

Spencer, Here is a paintio painting of Shannon Kringen. It is called "A Skinny Shannon Kringen with an Ice Cream Cone." I can't imagine that anyone will buy it, really I jo just hope she sees it. Price it however you want, if you do sell it, send me enough money for a pizza. Oh, here are some books as well. I made them today, I have terrible allergies & a head cold. Take care, Derek Erdman.

Aww, he just wants her to see it. How sweet and romantic, like when Eddie Argos says he wants a bus full of schoolchildren to sing to Emily Kane--wait, this woman is hideous, all hairy and pig-faced and slack-jawed, wielding a vanilla waffle cone like a club.

Sadly, there's no image available of her. (I took a phone picture of her, but I'm just lame enough that I don't know how to transfer.) You'll just have to go and see her yourself; you really should.

Kringen, what'd you do to this guy?

6 pm.

Quick stop at Platform Gallery, Ross Sawyers

Sawyers makes large-scale photographs of architectural models he builds. (It's a not-uncommon conceit mastered by James Casabere.) Sawyers is fresh out of grad school and still figuring things out, including how to mount his work (this dry board-mounted tactic seems to flatten them). I was drawn to this diptych:

Coming up at Platform: Scott Fife with all new work in September; in October, A Spectral Glimpse, a group show with Platform's first guest curator, the extraordinarily capable Jim O'Donnell.

6:15 pm.

James Harris Gallery: Rashid Johnson: Dark Matters

I'm writing about this one for next week, so I'll be quiet here and just give you this link and this image.

Jen Graves will be on KUOW at 9 am, talking about politics and art.

(But whatever. Call in and ask about men being pregnant.)

It's by popular vote, lady.

This video is all that remains of an enormous impromptu art installation that appeared for four hours last Thursday afternoon in Volunteer Park, then disappeared.

The artist was Susan Robb, and the installation was called Warmth, Giant Black Toobs no. 3 I wrote about it in a column that just came out today.

Last Thursday was quintessential July. I wouldn't have pegged Susan Robb for July, maybe October or April, something slyer, but last Thursday, she made a piece of quintessentially July art. It was hot and light and playful and right out on the lawn near the conservatory at Volunteer Park.

Robb has made her Toobs three times now. The first time was in Tieton, where the garbage-bag material they're made of got shredded in the wild grass. The second time, she took photographs, and sent them out in an email announcing that they'd be going up last week.

In [the photograph], seven big stalks (toobs) like black baseball bats towered over the trees and over the white-dome top of the conservatory. They looked like they were taking themselves unfortunately seriously. Photographs are such liars. The real toobs—a nice gender-crossing word—weren't serious at all. Staked to the ground at one end, they were flopping around in the wind like very conflicted, overly long phalluses. They were topped by knots that made their faces, when they came swinging in your direction, look like the butts of sausages.

Because of the difference between the toobs in photo and the toobs in person, I didn't want to post anything about the toobs on Slog until video was available--which just happened today (perfect timing).

And now that I see the video, I'm struck that the video toobs seem neither like the still photograph of toobs no. 2 from before:

nor like the way they were in person out there on the lawn (light, hot, playful).

In the video, they're much more mysterious, even a little foreboding, and very independent of the artist (which came across almost as strongly in person).

Robb's sense of humor is still there--see the final seconds, when you're stared down by the cyclops of a mischievous toob that breaks away from the bunch--but the lo-fi technology of Youtube and the sound she's added prevent this from being a document.

It's a new work.

The title of this post does not accurately convey my thoughts on Alopecia (which are, obviously, thoughts of deepest sympathy).

But it does convey my thoughts on the following video. "I am a painter and I paint abstract landscapes. From feelings."

And now, Bald Lady Paints With Head. Please enjoy.

(Thanks, Leah!)

Fuck—it is hot on the East Coast. But I just got back, and now this. Fuck.

Anyway, while I was there I saw these awesome pieces of graphic activism. Senators and fat cats whisked around Washington, D.C. have to travel in cars donned with these…

What license plate slogan would be most appropriate for politically correct and divided Washington State? Maybe “This space intentionally left blank”?

And next, from the Big Apple – which, when it bakes, smells nothing like apple pie – an agitprop wheat pasting. It’s a little Adbustersy, which can be insufferably pious, but this is a cheeky goad at New York’s starfuckers. (The “T” is missing from the beginning and the “e” is missing from the end. And, yes, the photo sucks.)

Regina Hackett breaks the news that the installation Alex Schweder made for Suyama Space this winter is becoming a part of the permanent collection at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. (Henry Urbach, a veteran supporter of Schweder's work, recently went to work at SFMoMA.)

Want to hear Schweder talk about his own work?

Listen to this podcast.

Sorry about the delay, but it's finally up. (Technological problems abounded; they did, they abounded.)

Meet the inimitable Mr. Bruch.

Yeah, it's just a commercial for a television that I'll never be able to afford, but it's really cool!

Watch it.

Our latest TV ad - featuring massive paint explosions - took 10 days and 250 people to film. Huge quantities of paint were needed to accomplish this, which had to be delivered in 1 tonne trucks and mixed on-site by 20 people.

The effect was stunning, but afterwards a major clean-up operation was required to clear away all that paint!

The cleaning took 5 days and 60 people. Thankfully, the use of a special water-based paint made it easy to scrape-up once the water had evaporated.

Keeping everyone safe was also an important factor. A special kind of non-toxic paint was used that is safe enough to drink (it contains the same thickeners that are sometimes used in soups). It was also completely harmless to the skin.

(Thanks to Colin for the tip.)

It's always good entertainment when critics get passionate about something they haven't seen. Rudy Giuliani, meet Regina Hackett. She's your kind of girl.

The truth is, on a deep level, critics love criticism. And Regina keeps it coming to me.

This time, she's so irritated with me for panning SuttonBeresCuller's recent performance--which happened while she was out of town--that she takes the opportunity to slam me (once again) on her blog. (My review of the performance first appeared in longer form on Slog.)

First, she says, I don't know criticism from insults. This from the critic who wrote, in direct retort to Sheila Farr (who'd gotten an exclusive preview and written an incisive review of Paul Allen's art collection that made Regina's review look late and weak in comparison): "Those who think the container cancels out the pleasures of the art contained need a checkup from the neck up." That sentence still cracks me up.

(My other favorite Hackettism was her blog post about my being wrong in my criticism of SBC's boat in the biennial at Tacoma Art Museum. She cited the responses of local critics to the work--questioning the credibility of one of those critics along the way--and decided that the vote was in: 2 out of 3 critics say the boat is good, so it must be! Take that, Graves!)

In this latest case, it's not just that I don't know from criticism. It's also that I don't know from genius. Because I question the quality of recent work by SBC, I would also have hated John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Morris Graves back when they were enlivening Seattle. Because--to quote once again from the review Regina wrote in 2005--John Sutton, Ben Beres, and Zac Culler are the reincarnation of Cage, Cunningham, and Graves.

Welcome back, Regina. I could spend all day trading barbs with you, it's so much fun. But I have to get back to the business of criticizing art rather than another critic--until next time, that is. See you on the flip side of another battle, lady.

Artist Trust announced yesterday that the painter Elizabeth Sandvig, who recently had a show at her gallery, Francine Seders, has won the $10,000 Twining Humber Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement.

Here's Elizabeth Bryant's great review of the show.

Sandvig will be honored at a reception September 7 at the Frye Art Museum.

^{Elizabeth Sandvig, Fox and Partridges, oil on canvas, 2006}

You know that haunted little room off the foyer at McLeod Residence where the 19th-century paintings used to hang? Through this week, Mandy Greer's show Parlor (above) is in there, with individual works for sale like this one, titled Little White Lion,

and this one,

titled White Milk Balls.

There's a closing party Thursday night (tomorrow), but the gallery doesn't turn over until after Saturday.

Then, opening July 6 is what promises to be an ambitious group show of interactive works (its title, Interactivity, seems criminally plain given the names of some of the works in the show: Biomimetic Butterflies, Running Plaid, Contexture).

My favorite part:

Contrary to popular opinion, things don’t go stale particularly fast in the art world. As they say, everything changes but the avant-garde. Chelsea was a ghost town last week, but had you been with the crush in Europe you’d have observed, at each stop, the same cast of museum directors and trustees, art advisers and clients, curators and more curators, artists, dealers, journalists, PR people, and who knows who else--all talking one another up, all on the lookout for the next paradigm shift. It’s a bubble environment. Everyone goes to the same exhibitions and the same parties, stays in the same handful of hotels, eats at the same no-star restaurants, and has almost the same opinions. I adore the art world, but this is copycat behavior in a sphere that prides itself on independent thinking.

Ed Winkleman has a brave post up on his blog today, about why galleries split the profits of sales with artists 50/50.

He dives all the way in, including a list detailing a typical dealer's expenses, beginning here:

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of the Gallery/Artist relationship is, not surprisingly, the most controversial aspect of any relationship in any business: money. Specifically, the 50/50 split of sales between the artist and dealer. Many folks outside the gallery system will look at that split and be amazed, I'm sure. The artist is the creative genius, the artist spent years in art school, the artist is the one putting it all on the line for the public to take pot shots at their vision. In other professions, like acting, managers only get 15% and agents only get 10%. Why on earth does the gallery take 50% of the money? The short answer is because it costs that much to promote the artist's work. The longer answer is, well...a bit like the adage about watching sausages being made. The following is a very unromantic discussion, leaving out issues such as how much the gallery believes in the work or how important the artist is to the world. Those things do matter, but I'm taking a wholly bottom-line view here to provide the most objective analysis and hopefully most useful information toward understanding this.

Winkleman spends the post justifying why galleries should take half. But he also gives a nod to artists who feel this is highway robbery:

In general, I find the artists most upset about the 50/50 split fall into one of two categories: 1) they don't understand the business that well (and many of them have never had full-time representation) or 2) they have a bad relationship with their gallery (i.e., their gallery is not doing enough in their opinion to earn the 50% they're taking). This second category of artists can also be broken down in two groups: those who are correct in their assessment that the gallery is not doing enough for their 50% and those who may not understand that the gallery is still behind in the deal in terms of recouping their investment and is actually doing more than their fair share for the 50%.

Normally, comments about art on this blog are limited to ad hominem attacks and mouth-breathing disses that date back to the impressionists ("I coulda made that").

But maybe I could hear from some artists actually represented in Seattle.

Does your dealer take half? Do you think it's fair? Have dealers in Seattle stepped up their promotion enough to leverage the new publicity Aqua Art Miami gives to Northwest artists? Who's the hardest-working dealer in town?

I have no reason to believe that Seattle dealers are lax in their duties, and I'm making no accusations with this line of questioning. But while Ed's being brave...

Last week many other capitals of culture got to see, on their local public TV stations, Simon Schama's gazillion-hour series on the history of great works by great artists from Caravaggio to Rothko, The Power of Art.

I tuned in to KCTS assuming it would air, but it wasn't there. That night I came down with a flu that swallowed my week and made me forgot to follow up or ask why.

Monday I was talking casually with folks at the Henry and discovered that Schama's series isn't coming to Seattle. It had been scheduled to air, but funding just didn't come through, was the word in the Henry offices.

That's a shame. Here's the NYT on what you missed, including the story of this painting by Caravaggio, made after he had himself killed a man.

Given the strength of the ceramics program at UW and Autio's importance in establishing contemporary ceramics, I thought some of you might want to know.

Today I was forced to look at the ugliest piece of public art in Seattle:

This thing squats out in front of King 5 studios on Dexter Avenue.

I left King 5 this afternoon wondering if it would be possible to have a meeting with Jean Enerson and other King 5 executives so we could discuss this and other issues? My hope is that it would be possible to build a more positive relationship between pedestrians in Seattle and the sidewalk out in front of King 5.

Thanks, Eric F! (Check out more on Josh Azzarella's blog.)

I can't decide who was more of a letdown: SuttonBeresCuller, or the audience that laughed at and cheered their shallow, dull, adolescent, clichéd, dim-witted, feeble new work at the Northwest New Works Festival last night.

The piece started with John Sutton, wearing old-man makeup and sitting at a desk, pushing paper like your typical sad sack. In a video projected behind him, he strokes a Playboy centerfold hidden in his papers. The audience laughed at this, but they had been laughing since the moment his face appeared on the screen. The audience knew the guys, or knew of them, and were there to cheer. With friends like these, artists don't need enemies.

Soon enough, the old man hobbles home. (On the way, two young guys wielding basketballs mock him.) He climbs into bed, and begins to dream his life as a young man, from his gleeful heel-clicking days with a chipper wide-eyed wife to the moment when everything falls apart, the moment when the word "ejaculation" is written on a chalkboard by a teacher in a twee nostalgia video from the 1950s. (Twee nostalgia videos—those black-and-white 1950s ads and PSAs sure are fun!—run throughout, interspliced with video of the man's life.)

The gleeful young man (played by Damien Luvara) is not so gleeful after the cells do their compulsory joining up on the video screen to make a baby. So he goes to a bar and gets drunk. He dances with a vixen and gets in a fight. Finally, he goes home to his wife, who isn't lovey dovey anymore. Now, she's a wildly gesticulating shrew. (Everything Is Keeping The Man Down!) She and everybody else who's ever been onstage (bartender, vixen, coworker, the doctor who delivered their old-faced oversized baby, the whole band "Awesome") chase him back to his work desk, where the doctor, now demented, begins sawing him in half as the mob chants and a red light falls on the scene.

A bell rings and the mob freezes. This is because the old man, who is dreaming the mob, gets up to pee. It is a comedically halting pee because, you know, he's old. Then he gets back in bed and the mob resumes. Then another bell rings. Time for the old man to get up. The actors shake off their personas and hug and high five and walk off. Another day starts for the old man.

The real nightmare is that every cutesy scene coasts by without being funny, unsettling, or sympathetic. One of the three would do.

It seems obvious that the mania of this piece is a release valve for the anxiety of three thirtyish guys getting older. And since they're only going to keep getting older, if this is their way of getting older as artists, then they're in trouble. It's like Neil Simon on a bad day, with a little sex and some mouth-foaming thrown in. Are their fears really this generic? Or is it supposed to be transgressive the way they're puncturing high art with bad jokes?

If it were a hoax, if there were any hint that this was intended as audience torture, then maybe you could at least appreciate their admitted haplessness in the face of an empty stage and a mountain of expectations. After all, the three artists have the hottest dealer in town. They have a storm of fans, including Regina Hackett, the art critic for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, who, as quoted in the program notes, compares them to Merce Cunningham, John Cage, and Morris Graves. Even typing the comparison makes me embarrassed. The point here is not that SBC are awful artists, it is that even when they make an awful work of art, nobody notices. When that happens, art in Seattle is in serious trouble.

Maybe the artists intended to pay tribute to strains in visual art, from the gory videos of Paul McCarthy to the costume dramas of Matthew Barney or the silly anarchy of dada theater. But the power of McCarthy's work comes from his implicit aggression toward the audience; SBC's piece was like a puppy alternating between licking the audience's face and licking its own balls. There was one almost-success: the long-armed, boxing-gloved, foaming-at-the-mouth costume that Matt Richter wore as the main character's tormentor. But the tormentor's appearance at the moment of impregnation was so offensive that it was hard to care about his alluringly strange costume.

For those catching up: getting a girl pregnant is traumatic for boys.

But let's put aside the retrograde politics, since they're nauseating. Let's just make a list of the clichés: Dream sequence device. Man in Gray Flannel Suit. Egg and sperm join on film. Married man flirts with vixen in a bar. Woman is at home waiting for her husband. Old men love Playboy. Old men's bladders are funny. Jocks are bullies. Desk jobs are boring. Those are the first nine that come to mind.

Or maybe the references were in theater, film, and TV: David Lynch? Nihilist playwright Sarah Kane? Or even "There's Something About Mary"? "Porky's"? "Married With Children"? I'm trying here.

The truth is, despite all the cheering, nothing happened on that stage.

The Pigs on Parade are back this summer. But I write about art, so those are the first and last eight words I will be writing about pigs on our streets.

Everything worth saying on the matter has been said by Emily Hall, former Stranger art critic.

What must happen, what absolutely must happen, is for this city to get over its ambivalence and distaste for ambition. You don't become a great art city by filling the street with painted pigs. You become a great art city by supporting artists doing what artists do.

You must listen to Seattle artist Whiting Tennis talk. This episode is one of the best artist interviews ever on In/Visible (the weekly art podcast). Seriously.

Did you know, for instance, that the piece the Seattle Art Museum recently bought was actually intended to move around the city, sitting in empty lots, Matta-Clark-style?

That a cat carrier can be made of string?

Tennis is smart, he's open, he's slightly grumpy, he's easygoing, and he's an important Seattle artist. Check it out.

^{Detail of Blue Tarp by Whiting Tennis (2007). The whole painting is 12 feet wide and 8 feet tall, and went on display Saturday night at Tacoma Art Museum.}

Grenada has an underwater sculpture garden.

(Thanks for the tip, Nancy!)

Joe Nickell, the Missoulian writer who is part of a new blog on ArtsJournal called Flyover: Art from the American Outback. Nickell writes at the heart of his subjects (chiefly music), he's mellifluous in print, and, in person, he has a hell of a way with old-timey shirts.

The blog is a group portrait of art in smaller cities by arts journalists of all kinds. It's exactly the sort of thing I wish had been around (Nickell and co. invented it several months ago) when I was writing about art in Denton, Texas, and in Tacoma, where my boss once asked me whether the dancers at the ballet also sing while they're performing.

These writers have tough jobs, jobs with high highs and low lows, jobs where cynicism is not an option. Read them. Throw in your comments.

“Sometimes I have some challenging ideas, or crazy like some other people would say. This time I thought about our cat who is the whole day out, returning sometimes hungry sometimes not, sometimes with traces of fights, sometimes he stay also the night out. When he finally returns, I wonder where he was and what he did during his day. This brought me to the idea to equip the cat with a camera.”

So says Mr. Lee, creator of Cat Cam, a website offering a photo journal composed of pictures taken by his cat. Mr. Lee also gives helpful how-to instructions on outfitting your own fancy feline with its very own Cat Cam.

Thanks to the always-delightful Enchanted Porkfist.

The biggest art exhibition in the world has begun to accept visitors, and the critics are blogging. I won't be able to send updates tomorrow, when many will probably come in, because of Freaky Friday, but I can tell you who's out there doing what.

The NYT's arts blog, Artsbeat, looks like it intends to be all over it, with words and pics.

Time critic Richard Lacayo, the best blogging critic for my money, is already in with some preliminary thoughts about Rob Storr's big show in the big show.

Charlotte Higgins from the Guardian podcasted on her first day here, and I'd stay tuned to the Guardian blog—it always has something going on. (A good little backgrounder by Adrian Searle here.)

Wish I were there; I'm hoping to go in September. More soon on how the Felix Gonzalez-Torres sculpture of reflecting pools just barely touching (below, installed in the entry courtyard of the US pavilion, photo from the NYT today), almost stood at Western Washington University instead.

So perfect for ads!

From Bernard Perroud.

In all the architectural and big-name chatter at the SAM opening, many interesting and more obscure artists were pushed aside, most of them dead or at the very least already established (the late John Covert and the very much alive Jo Baer, who was born in Seattle and educated at UW and who might make a good SAM survey considering her various turns, for example).

But then there's the young Canadian artist Sonny Assu, whose work is marooned in a hallway off the Native American galleries. His cereal boxes are bitingly revamped to reflect the relationship between natives and the governments that screwed them: "Treaty Flakes," "Lucky Beads," "Salmon Crisp," "Salmon Loops," "Bannock Pops."

In case you noticed his work dangling out there alone in the hall and wondered in what context it really belonged, Assu will talk about his art and influences Saturday (June 9) at 6 pm at SAM's auditorium.*

^{*(We might have Suggested this, or at least run it in the listings, but Seattle Art Museum sent the release about the event after the paper went to press this week.)}

She's a longtime Seattle artist and teacher, she's fighting breast cancer, and she's in need of financial aid, her students tell me. If you've ever intended to pick up one of her paintings for your collection, now's the time.

^{Mexico, 2002, oil and wax on canvas}

The police and the insurance company are now involved in investigating the embezzlement of $200,000 from the Bellevue Arts Museum that the museum has said was committed by its chief financial officer.

From a new letter BAM sent its supporters:

First, we filed a notice of claim with our insurer. Second, we made a referral to the Bellevue Police Department. We intend to work with both the insurer and the authorities to ensure that the Museum's interests are protected and that any losses are recovered. In addition, the Museum is taking steps to tighten its financial controls. We have already adopted a number of controls designed to prevent similar misconduct. The forensic accountant, our independent auditing firm and our financial committee are reviewing and approving an updated and improved accounting procedures manual, as well as considering other measures.

Who else for today? Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons.

Yesterday and today the Guardian has had a blitz of coverage on Hirst's new exhibition, the media highlight of which is his diamond-encrusted skull for sale for 50 million pounds. Who'll buy it? The first name the Guardian throws out is Paul Allen. My first thought was: nah, considering the conservatism of what he owns, I doubt it.

But is the skull a conservative or a progressive work? Will it be a joke on the one who buys it, or a genuine treasure? In a quick interview with one of the several Guardian writers dispatched to deal with the spectacle, Hirst says, "To me it seems gentle, quite soft. I would hope that anybody looking at it would get a bit of hope, and be uplifted. We need to line the world with beautiful things that give you hope." What's with the naif-speak? Sounds blank, just like Koons. But back to that.

Guardian critic Jonathan Jones today declares a totally immoderate love for the skull (he compares its stature to Picasso's Demoiselle exactly a century ago), and even asks Britain to shell out the 50 mil to keep it within the isle's borders.

Jones, for all his overzealousness, makes a convincing case for Hirst's grand gesture. He sees something besides stale references to Warhol and Duchamp, something ancient. Which is why I find Hirst's tone in the quote to be so disappointing. I'd love to believe that this object is, as Jones calls it, the "King of Death," something high and mighty and low and dirty all at the same time, but something not funny, not a joke, not ironic, not about that sorry old little subject of art.

I wish I could be over there to see for myself. (Conversely, I haven't had a regret about missing that other big show that a major publication's critic has raved about in the last few days: Richard Serra's retrospective at MoMA, oddly fawned over by Michael Kimmelman. Is it the art or the critic? Goes to show the lasting power of rhetoric.)

And what about Koons? Most of his work irritates me, and his persona certainly does. Many people see it as an update of Warhol. Who ever needed an update on the endgame that was Warhol? (Reminds me of what Alec Soth so simply uttered on his blog today about another artist, "Certainly only one photographer is allowed to bury his photographs"). And B, Koons achieves profundity simply by being confusing. This isn't a living koan, it's a lazy American.

But for a piece that ran Sunday, Koons told The Observer something that struck a nerve with me, having just seen the new show Sparkle Then Fade at Tacoma Art Museum:

Too verbose to be oracular, too random to be eloquent, Koons nevertheless releases the occasional pearl of sense. The real readymades he's interested in, he says, are not the objects, but the people reflected in them. Inflatable toys, which have influenced him since the beginning of his career, 'turn everything inside out. They're dense on the outside, and everything that's ethereal is on the inside. We inhale air, that's a sign of life, and when you exhale your last breath that's a sign of death. When an inflatable has a hole in it, it's deadly.'

In that case, there's more than one potentially toxic work at TAM these days (the first is Jack Daws's bubblegum machine filled with prescription drugs), because the yellow-flower Koons inflatable in the gallery has a slow leak. It sags on its pedestal and has to be re-inflated from time to time, but it wouldn't be right to patch the hole, because that would compromise the original object, Rock Hushka, the show's curator, told me. The owners (the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation) are stuck between a flower and a soft place.

I went to SAM's sculpture garden/glorified pedestrian overpass twice this weekend. It was, uh, nice enough. But the best piece of public art I saw on my visit wasn't in the park at all. It was along the waterfront in Myrtle Edwards Park...

I loves me some driftwood art. Nice work, whoever pulled that piece together. SAM should write you a check, cast the thing in bronze, and put one of their "don't you FUCKING touch this thing" signs on it.

The worst piece of public art I saw on my trip wasn't in the sculpture garden/glorified overpass... or in Myrtle Edwards Park... or in downtown at all. It was in Fremont... and I spotted it on my ride home... and it's monstrous and something ought to be done...

Have any drunken frat boys died trying to climb this thing? Any apartments been broken into because of it? Any way we can get it declared a public menace and hauled away?