Former Republican Party Precinct Committee Officer for the Central District Claude Zervas (right), and painter Joe Park. (Photo by Jenny Zwick)

This week's paper is online now, and I want to add to my In Art News account of the 20th anniversary Artist Trust auction, because I just got a press release that says Artist Trust grossed more than $260,000 at the sparkly affair on Saturday night.

That means Artist Trust will give 20 percent more money directly to artists in 2007. (In 2006, 52 artists received some $70,000 in GAP grants.) The fundraiser was a record for the organization.

I reported that video artist Gary Hill summoned an easy $20,000 by offering $10,000 of his own, but it turns out his dough continued to generate cash past when I was looking--right up to $61,000. The man was there to raise money, as he said.

The highest bid of the night was Michael Spafford's Europa and the Bull II-3 (1986) at $4,250. No argument from me that the piece was beautiful: a roughly sketched black-and-white tribute to the mythical scene in which Europa's curvaceous body was cut out of the center like a brutal Matisse.

Earlier today I posted The Seattle Art "Scene", and by some people's responses, it seems they think I should have titled it The Seattle "Art" Scene, due to my own inability to discern the difference between a media prank and something that's actually of interest to art or artists in Seattle.

Non-Specific Entity over at Artdish writes the following:

If I wanted the merry pranksters I'd still be dropping acid with hillbilly hippies in West Virginia. Can we get out of the joke? get out of the concept of the concept? and actually make something worth defining as a "movement" or "scene"? Why is everything in Seattle so up tight? so "intellectual".. Why can't I find anyone who just makes what they feel? Heck, half the best known local painters are using masking tape and a ruler.. Everyone seems to be conceptualizing their work.. There is too much "look at me.. look at my thought" and not enough look at the actual result of my thoughts and feelings.

This sounds very good, and I would completely agree, except that everything in Seattle is not so intellectual and uptight. Plenty of artists work intuitively and toward final objects that are as emotionally evocative as they are intelligent. Dan Webb, Claude Zervas, Jeffry Mitchell, Claire Cowie, Patrick Holderfield, Jenny Heishman, and Lead Pencil Studio come flying off the top of my head first thing as artists who pretty much do "make what they feel."

Slog commenter Sarah Moon writes:

Seattle is working on having a scene of prank art by smirking frat boy geniuses who practice the art of being assholes. What was so smart or creative about the TAM antics? Please enlighten me, Jen!

The phenomenon of SBC is a little uncomfortable for me, too, not because I think they're frat boys or assholes but because I think they're in danger of being swept away by their own publicity. Some people seem to think that if you know them, you know art in the city, and that's just weird. But I haven't gotten the impression that they see it that way.

Most of the photographs in their Lawrimore Project show depicted their cute little selves mugging for the camera, and while people liked those, no, they weren't great artworks. In trying to fit into a for-profit gallery scenario (read: to actually sell something), they sold what was easiest: their personas. It complicated things, which is where, I think, the fakers come in.

TotorTu'm (death or R. Mutt?) weighed in with another take:

I find it hard to believe that it is Lundgren's contention that "fakers can do SBC works just as well." Such hubris is just not one of his traits. Can you confirm/deny this statement Jen?

One tiny, tinfoil tree, as 'funny, smart, and aggressive" as it is, is not tantamount to the SBC corpus.

It seems to me that Greg Lundgren is like a good critic. He's part of the art world, and how much a part of it he is at any given moment depends on the strength of his ideas. I do think what he does is interesting when it's interesting. And nope, I don't think hubris enters into it. A joke isn't the same thing as a factual proposal.

But what would be the problem with interrogating both the reception of an SBC piece and SBC itself? Going by a single conjoined name, like a band or a celebrity, they're asking for it. Big deal.

My take on the tin foil tree was that it was a simple spoof. Just fooling. A fake tree by fake artists one-ups a fake tree by a big-name artist. Nice move.

The second act I know of by Lundgren et al is more pointed in the direction I was referring to. It happened this past weekend at a media event at the Tacoma Art Museum.

I wasn't there, but I hear that while a sailboat was being lowered by crane into the open-air atrium at the center of the museum, the fakers were standing by wearing berets and smoking cigarettes from ridiculous cigarette-holders, sporting nametags that said "John," "Ben," and "Zac." And the media did confuse them with the real performance artists (who often portray themselves in ridiculous fictions as well, but not usually fictions about being artists).

What does that tell you? Well, maybe in Seattle it would tell you that even the most visible artists are not so broadly visible. Performed in Tacoma, does it mean that hinterlanders are just too dim to recognize the difference between an actual artist and a stereotype of an artist? That's a dead-end observation, though of some interest as a provocation (I'll be curious to see whether The News Tribune plays ball in the aftermath of being duped; could be some very fun art writing coming out of this.)

SBC does have a history with plucking themselves out of context. Parking a mobile living room in the suburbs and living in it for a while made a point about how lost contemporary art and artists can be outside primly inscribed city circles. The fakers are extending the conversation by presenting these locally "famous" artists as French idiots.

The question is, what's the relationship between the fakers and the original three? I've heard tell of a sixsome ...

For anybody not frequenting art openings, this Onion story from 2005 appears to be illustrated with a photograph of sometime Seattle Times critic and longtime Seattle art personality Matthew Kangas.

Art panties have become bunched on Artdish.

My podcast last week with Anne Mathern and Chad Wentzel of Crawl Space ticked off M., founder of the now-defunct Visual Codec.

In particular, she objected to Mathern and Wentzel's claim that there is no art "scene" in Seattle, and to my seeming endorsement of that claim in the description of the podcast, "Anne Mathern and Chad Wentzel on How Seattle Doesn't Have an Art Scene."

In an email, M. wrote to me,

i love your little corner of the web, but the title "How Seattle Doesn't Have an Art Scene" just made me so sad...the role of press in making or breaking a scene can be a crucial one...if a tree falls in the woods and nobody's there to report on it and so on...

i know we've lost a lot lately (conworks, carolyn zick's longtime
notebook, vc, maybe coca...) but does that really mean that there is no visual arts scene in seattle? it's always been there for me when i go looking for it...

So what's the deal with me? Do I agree with Mathern and Wentzel? If not, why didn't I rag all over them in the podcast or mock them in the headline?

I've actually been thinking about this since they said it. I shouldn't have been surprised, since I invited them knowing they'd present a too-cool united front, but somehow their arrogance, free of the self-loathing that has come to be such a social lubricant, took my breath away. I just wanted to get it on tape, and send it out into the world to see what would happen. And now I see.

Does Seattle have a "scene"?

Well, if you mean, does anything worthwhile happen here, then hell, yes, it does. Otherwise I wouldn't bother writing about it, and when I did, you wouldn't bother reading about it. Come on. (Is Seattle's scene better than it used to be? I don't know for sure. I'm new. But I can always find something worth cheering for or complaining about.)

But if you mean does Seattle have a glamor-generating substrata based on an exclusionary social hierarchy that may or may not be tied to a series of artistic convictions, then hell, no, it doesn't.

In fact, sometimes I think Seattle deliberately undercuts the prospect of such a thing. Scott Lawrimore may be trying to change that, but in a particularly Seattle--and a particularly self-conscious--sort of way.

For the closing party of the Genius Awards show at the Henry, Lawrimore rented a limo and drove his artists in high style to the museum. But from what I heard afterward, Lawrimore wasn't intending to recreate the high-school prom or the setting for a West Coast-East Coast shootout. He's riffing on those trappings, poking fun of them while taking part in them, and so are his artists.

The recent incarnation of a new, "fake" SuttonBeresCuller trio is another case of celebrityfication mocked. Greg Lundgren noticed that SuttonBeresCuller the artist trio had become SuttonBeresCuller the icon, and he decided to tweak the problem to the nth degree--proposing that fakers can do SBC works just as well. It's funny, smart, aggressive, and it testifies to Seattle's conflicted relationship with scenes and scenesterism, as a young, self-conscious, and underdog city only once in its history swept into the national "scene" by an artist who killed himself in a house by the lake.

And therefore, the wonderful online regional art monthly, Visual Codec, is on hiatus, probably permanently.

From M., the editor and founder:

When it became clear that, instead of drawing a sustainable amount of resources from my life, Visual Codec had instead eclipsed my life, I spent a couple of agonizing months exploring whether I could move the publication forward in a different direction.

Regretfully, all roads ultimately led here, to the part where I'm telling you what I'm telling you.

Visual Codec was great for a lot of reasons. It was smart and appeared magically, out of nowhere one day exactly a year ago. I'm sorry it's disappearing as fast. M., I loved reading what you and your writers wrote and gathered, and I tip my hat to you. I know you're leaving to pursue your own artmaking, and I wish you luck.

And maybe now that you have the experience in publishing, the itch will hit you again one day ... we can only hope.

This weekend, I stopped by Crawl Space for the absurdly titled exhibition Centennial (the gallery's been open three years) and met the painter Ori Ornstein, a newish member of the artist-run space having his first show this month.

He's a painter, and a transplant from the East Coast, and he claims there's not much painting in Seattle.

We are about to see a bunch of it: the contemporary Leipzig school written about so fascinatingly in today's Guardian at the Frye Art Museum opening February 17, Mary Henry at Howard House opening tonight, and Ten Painters at Francine Seders opening February 23.

But in a deeper sense, is it true that Seattle is painting-lite?

Anne Mathern and Chad Wentzel, his CS cohorts, say yes on this week's In/Visible podcast. They're planning to fill the gallery one of these months with just two large "painty paintings," as Mathern calls them, largely because, well, it seems to them like nobody else is filling their galleries with painty paintings.

I think I know what Mathern means by "painty painting," and I can think of a lot of artists represented in Seattle who fall under the category: Mary Henry, Joseph Park, Squeak Carnwath, Mark Takamichi Miller, Robert C. Jones, Olivia Britt, Donabelle Casis, Margie Livingston (this year's Betty Bowen Award winner), Brian Murphy, Susan Dory, Michael Schultheis, Matthew Offenbacher, Mark Danielson, Francis Celentano, Juan Alonso, Denzil Hurley, Mike Spafford, Anne Appleby, Joseph Goldberg, Patte Loper, Jaq Chartier, Michael Knutson, Roger Shimomura, Jeffrey Simmons, Susan Dory, Bo Bartlett, Claire Johnson, Nicholas Nyland.

But there is no coherent strain of emerging Seattle painters to fill out the rosters of interested dealers like, say, Billy Howard or Scott Lawrimore, the way a crop of photographers sharing at least some collective concerns has developed, from Tim Roda and Todd Simeone (no longer in Seattle, but represented here) to Anne Mathern, Chris Engman, Isaac Layman, Steve Davis, and Chris Jordan.

Lawrimore Project has thrown its hat into the painting ring for the moment--sort of. Scott Lawrimore has no painters in his stable and this month's LP *Hearts* Painting is comprised of a single painting in an otherwise empty gallery: Michael Linares's "Fuck Duchamp" statement, "pictured" here in a funny non-photograph. (Linares, also, is not a painter.) It's as if Lawrimore were throwing down the gauntlet to local painters: where are you? Why do I have this empty space in my gallery?

The image seems to be a telling one for Seattle painting. Is it here at all? Is it hidden? Is it taboo? (I've heard the criticism of the UW painting department before--can that really be the reason for the paucity in new painting? Why don't any interesting painters come out of the ceramics department, known as it is for churning out grads in any medium but ceramics?)

For a little background on the technique employed by Cartoon Network's ad-pranksters in Boston, check out the instructional video over at Graffiti Research Lab. Also, what kind of dipshit can't tell the difference between a lite-brite and a bomb?

The Guardian has an entertaining profile of Gilbert & George. Here's a snippet:

George's theory is that homophobia is still alive and well, even in the supposedly liberal and bohemian art world. 'There's a lot of closet gay bashing,' he says. 'There are journalists who attack us without saying anything about that [their sexuality], but you can see clearly what it is. The Guardian once said: "They must be very unhappy, after all these years, of being called filthy queers." The Guardian! Extraordinary!' In fact, he thinks the art world and the media are a good deal less tolerant than the man on the street. In their real lives, no one ever abuses them.

'No! They love us!' says Gilbert.

'Taxi drivers love us!' adds George.

An editor at Thames & Hudson once told George that usually, with art, the critics and the artist must gang up to convince the public. But in the case of he and Gilbert, it has always been the other way round. 'At our last show at the White Cube, there were 30,000 visitors.'

They expect Tate Modern to be equally swamped: people are mad for art just now - although, personally, he and Gilbert disdain gallery going.

Gilbert: 'We don't look at other artists.'

George: 'We don't socialise with other artists.'

Gilbert: 'We haven't been to a gallery in 30 years.'

George: 'We don't belong to the gallery-going class, you see.'

So they didn't see Velasquez at the National Gallery? George yelps, as if stung. 'Never! Why would I want to join a long line of middle-class twits? We want to see the world as it is, naked. We left the house the other day at 6.25am, and there in the street was a dead, flattened rat, and a crow feasting from it. That's an amazing image, isn't it? I shall remember it forever.' At the memory of this ravenous crow and its macabre breakfast, the pair of them sip their Nescafe contemplatively.

From The Art Law Blog: Not everybody believes that casino mogul Steve Wynn's elbow was actually pointy enough to have poked a hole in Picasso's Le Reve (The Dream) the way he says he did. Insurance agents may make a cast of his elbow in order to find out.

What, then, of Norah Ephron's testimony as an eyewitness on Huffington Post?

For his second show at James Harris Gallery, Mark Mumford presents a series of brief statements assembled as circles on the white gallery walls. (Imagine the shortest sentence you’ve seen today pulled into a perfect, tire-sized ring with the lowermost words upside down.) Some examples: A MEMORY OF BEING HAPPY IN THE WORLD, A SILENCE SO PERFECT IT CANNOT BE DESCRIBED, and NO ONE CAN SEE US. Described on the gallery's web site as a response to authoritative communication and advertising, Mumford’s words are fuzzy and vague, wanting interpretation.

The same has been said of Jenny Holzer’s text-based artwork. Throughout her 30-year career, Holzer has shifted between elaborate methods of display, such as huge, site-specific electronic signs, and very ordinary advertising and information media like posters, stickers, and T-shirts. Holzer’s first few text series are thematic strings of contradictory statements presented as the impossible observations of a single voice. As with Mumford, interpreting Holzer’s early writing brings out your history and biases; but Holzer’s writing resonates in a way that Mumford’s does not.

Take, for instance, Mumford’s NO ONE CAN SEE US and pair it with some of Holzer’s texts on the theme of invisibility:

WHEN YOU'VE BEEN SOMEPLACE FOR A WHILE YOU ACQUIRE THE ABILITY TO BE PRACTICALLY INVISIBLE. THIS LETS YOU OPERATE WITH A MINIMUM OF INTERFERENCE.

YOU'RE HOME FREE AS SOON AS NO ONE KNOWS WHERE TO FIND YOU.

MORE PEOPLE WILL BE BUILDING HIDING PLACES IN THEIR HOMES, SMALL REFUGES THAT ARE UNDETECTABLE EXCEPT BY SOPHISTICATED DEVICES.

All of Holzer’s sentences could be implied by Mumford’s statement if you work backwards from Holzer’s heady suggestions to Mumford’s dry assertion, but not the other way around. Mumford’s texts resemble those of a fledgling poet, an author who writes simple, generic statements, relying on the reader to stuff the shell of his words with content. Holzer’s descriptions of the complexities of being and knowing and remembering are more sophisticated and precise. She is both authoritative and ambiguous, controlling the channels she critiques. Mumford's writing is blank, but not critically so; it's not anti-writing, but almost non-writing.

Disclaimer: I am a former employee of Holzer. I read and re-read her writing for various work-related purposes for more than four years, so comparisons such as this are a reflex, like smiling.

--Abigail Guay

The perennially troubled Center on Contemporary Art is moving out of 410 Dexter Ave North on Sunday and temporarily taking up residence at Shilshole Bay Beach Club, in Ballard, which is not an exhibition space.

Why else? Lack of money. The alternative art space already owes its landlord a chunk—reportedly, $36,000—and can't afford to continue to rack up debt, said Mike Sweney, a member of the board of trustees. (I haven't yet heard back from Joe Roberts, the board president and owner of a company that owns the Shilshole Bay Beach Club.)

For a while now (see The Stranger's 2000 story Death: The Next Step for CoCA?), the rap on CoCA has been that its best years are behind it. In February 2004, it moved into the large space in the South Lake Union neighborhood as a way to recharge. But that didn't work.

"We moved into South Lake Union expecting an arts renaissance -- the Wright Space and Winston Wachter across the street, ConWorks and 911 around the corner, and commercial galleries considering a move to SLU -- it was starting to look like the new frontier for the arts," Sweney wrote in an email. "Alas, things didn't work out that way. Except for openings, traffic has been non-existent, leading to a precipitous drop in membership. Several key board members have recently left and we have been hesitant to fill those voids until we figure out our next step. We need to find a space and neighborhood that can fully support our mission."

CoCA emits little jolts of energy, but for years it has seemed like a great love affair that's over but hasn't yet been ended. It seems sad to advocate for the death of something so weak, so I won't.

The current show, Judith Kindler: Consuming Youth, will be up at the South Lake Union space today through Sunday, noon to 5. It will be at least partially installed at the Ballard location, Sweney says.

1. Suspended over the pool at Aqua Art Miami, Leo Saul Berk's cloud made of tough plastic parts fell flat. Now I realize it's like I didn't even see it. Focused light should be listed on its label as one of its materials, because lit in a gallery, it comes alive. At Howard House (through Saturday), its blues and whites bounce against each other with a sort of lulling, pointillist rhythm. Beautiful.

2. Ellen Garvens's large, slyly staged photographs of plaster molds for prosthetic limbs present the molds ambiguously, wrapped in gauze, mounted, arranged, or rising from translucent white paper that makes it look like they're floating in their white backgrounds. Are they ruins being held for safekeeping? Failures in a sculptor's studio? Through Saturday at Davidson Contemporary. (She'll also be in the Tacoma Art Museum Biennial.)

3. Mary Henry is 94 this year and has been making and showing geometric abstract paintings since before the United States entered World War II. Her show of paintings at Howard House opens February 1 (reception February 8), but this wall mural is already up.

It reminds me of early Russian graphic art, which gives me an excuse to post one of the great political posters of all time: El Lissitzky's 1919 Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge. Beat them! Stab them! Good Friday morning!

Thomas Eakins's The Gross Clinic (1875)

Timea Tihanyi's Neither Here, Nor There (After Southworth and Hawes: Demonstration of the Surgical Use of Ether) (2005)
(Part of Tihanyi's series of felt cut-outs suspended in rubber, based on historical photographs of the earliest trials with ether. At Davidson Contemporary through Saturday.)

This intricately handmade sculpture, John Grade's latest, called Collector, began in Grade's studio and hangs in the clean white space of Davidson Contemporary. It bears his signature sense of almost too-exquisite craftsmanship. But it will not remain spotless.

After Saturday, it will be submerged in Puget Sound for a while, until oysters attach to it. Then, for the final stage, Grade will mount it to his truck and drive it through the dusty Southwest. Grade often pushes the rare comparison of Northwest and Southwest, possibly the two most climatically disparate yet linked regions in the US.

Collector's process is like a Simon Starling project in Toronto at the Harbourfront Centre Power Plant, but with very different intentions. While Grade's object is semi-fragile and his results are only loosely predicted, the British artist sunk a steel reproduction of a Henry Moore bronze into Lake Ontario as a commentary on foreign influence and a way of representing the nationalistic tension that made Moore a controversial postwar figure in the city. (Taxpayers had refused to fund the installation of one of Moore's sculptures outside Toronto's city hall because he wasn't Canadian; private donors purchased it anyway, and it has become a prized possession of the city.)

In the several months it was underwater, Starling's steel version of Warrior with Shield (1954) was invaded by the Eastern European zebra mussel, a non-native species that has invaded the waters of the Great Lakes since coming over from the Black Sea in the ballast water of ships around 20 years ago. Last I heard, the Art Gallery of Ontario planned to take the piece (commissioned by the Power Plant) into its collection, which also includes Warrior with Shield.

Will anyone take in Grade's study? I like its vulnerability and openness much better than Starling's overly determined symbolism, and I'm curious what the trip will do to it. See Collector in its infancy through Saturday at DC.

I say that with nothing but love. The photographer, who was picked up by Lawrimore Project in Miami after his pastiched bookcase photograph took the place by storm, is now showing in the white-cube gallery at LP.

The six images at Lawrimore Project (see those and more on his artist's page) are limited in tone (mostly black to white) but range widely in technique and approach.

Unlike many of the big names in photography, from Sherman to Goldin to Struth, Layman has no signature style, or at least not yet. The closest you could come is to say that he subtly alters or arranges everyday objects for the sake of photography. It's his insistence on the subtlety of his intervention and the gorgeous way he executes each image that keeps you coming back. Coat Hanger (2003), for instance, is an austerely beautiful formal portrait. Is the hanger hanging? Is it lying down? The questions fade the longer you allow yourself to be seduced by the thick, round lines in the landscape of white.

The performative nature of what he does before he takes the photographs (or after, in the case of the digitally compiled bookcase image) is made literal in the earliest work in the show. It's a 2001 black-and-white portrait of himself in a sweatshirt, pointing out a window to another window that looks like it has a window built into it. It's called, of course, Window.

Also earlier are his photograms. A portrait of himself in a chair, made of collaged photograms (2002), is ghostly and impressive in size, but it comes off as bland. A 2003 photogram of a lawn mower mounted on a plinth makes the opposite use of the technology—it's eggheaded and witty in a warm way, like what comes later.

For White T-Shirt (2004), the triumph of the show, Layman drew dark lines on a folded T-shirt. He made a spotless white T-shirt look like one of van Gogh's boots: used, rustic, loved, lovable. At the same time, all of those charming cartoonish marks are obviously fake, and the shirt is no longer a shirt, but a drawing on one part of the shirt. So now it's a photograph of a drawing on a sculpture, an homage to and a critique of each one of those disciplines.

In response to my post last week, Does Sculpture Exist? Or the Search for Traction, "George Metesky" (the name of the "mad bomber" who hit New York City dozens of times in the 40s and 50s) wrote:

It's rare that you get two writers - in this case one quoting another - so specifically ignorant about their chosen (even professed) focus.

The point of reference here is the hardly obscure essay "Art and Objecthood", by Michael Fried. A nearly thirty year old essay, it should be said.

In attempting to oversimplify and co-opt Fried's central, landmark thesis on what he termed "theatricality", Burton gives uninformed Graves just enough rope to (publicly) hang herself with.

Posted by George Metesky | January 19, 2007 07:54 PM

Actually, I'm glad you brought up the Fried piece. It's a great touchstone that, you're right, I should have thought to mention. Krauss hated Fried's overly broad dismissal of "theatrical" sculpture, and it's a fair and even interesting accusation that Burton's assertion coopted Fried's argument without crediting him, but far more interesting is why Burton would choose this tack now. (Especially considering the drubbing Fried took when he wrote it -- what if he'd written it today?)

That said, why are you such an asshole? As a superior sculptural thinker, all you can do is drop an obvious missed reference? Anonymously?

Comparing cocks expertise is dull, stupid, and small. I write out of curiosity. Naturally I try to be informed, and in this case I happen to be more informed than you thought I was. But even if I hadn't been, I'm not slain by the prospect that somebody else thought of a good idea, question, or reference that I didn't -- I'm glad to have it to consider.

I realize there are few things more fascinating to write about than me, but I challenge you to write under your real name, and about sculpture, my original subject. What say you about the Krauss/Fried conversation today? Why are Burton and Ellegood and Handforth talking like this now? (Jesus, this stuff was too wonky for Tyler Green, who put up an Art BS alert about it, and it wasn't wonky enough for you, bomber. A girl can not win.)

Or, if you want to continue to masturbate all over our fine Slog, you can do that, too.

When I interviewed the Decemberists in PDX a couple months ago, talk turned to my passion for crafts, and Chris Funk told me about "an art installation of peace" called knitnotwar 1,0o0. Inspired by Sadako Sasaki, who folded 1,000 origami cranes after the US atom bombings of Hiroshima in 1945, Portland artist Seann McKeel is rounding up folks to knit and felt a thousand origami-style cranes. The whole teeming flock will be displayed in late 2007 in the Rose City. (There's a nice pic of a modest gaggle of them here.)

For information on how to get involved, a downloadable pattern, photographs, etc., visit www.knitnotwar.com. I completed my first crane this weekend. Here are a couple photos. The actual knitting and finishing went very quickly — the felting was the only time-consuming part (it took three washes to get the quality I wanted).

In The Stranger Suggests on Saturday, I got carried away and called the Olympic Sculpture Park a former Superfund site, which it isn't. (Sorry, Chris.)

It's a brownfield, which is defined by the EPA as follows:

Brownfields are abandoned, idled, or under-used industrial and commercial facilities where expansion or redevelopment is complicated by real or perceived environmental contamination.

Superfund sites are the worst of the worst—the country's most contaminated hazardous waste sites.

While we're on the subject of reuse, the Time art and architecture critic Richard Lacayo has a nice piece setting OSP in the context of other rescue sites.

So this isn't just a park in the city. It's a park with the city in it. Talk about the machine in the garden. ... This is the direction that some of the most interesting new parks in the world are taking. In their search for usable parkland, densely developed cities in the U.S. and Europe are combing through their brownfields, disused and sometimes contaminated industrial sites. The Olympic Sculpture Park, for instance, is located on the former site of a fuel-storage and -transfer facility, which is why nearly all the original soil had to be dug out and carted away. And the City of New York is planning a huge and inventive new park atop Fresh Kills, the massive landfill--meaning garbage dump--on Staten Island where much of the debris from the Twin Towers was hauled after 9/11.

Because it was such a rowdy party at the Olympic Sculpture Park opening this weekend—Seattle Art Museum clickers counted 23,000 visitors Saturday and 12,000 Sunday—museum conservators are out pressure-washing Richard Serra's Wake this morning.

"The oils from people's fingers were making marks, I think," says museum spokeswoman Cara Egan."It's not serious damage."

Another source told me the marks looked keyed in. Egan said she didn't know of any keying. Here's an image by fweez that I found on Flickr of one tag (Lena):

The performance art trio SuttonBeresCuller planted their graffiti (photo from Greg Lundgren): a 3-foot stainless steel tree called Splinter, after Roxy Paine's 50-foot stainless steel tree called Split. The museum, for now, is allowing the homage/parody to stand. But "I don't think it will be there for very long," Egan says.

UPDATE: Christopher Frizzelle got a tip this afternoon that it wasn't SuttonBeresCuller after all who put up Splinter (they haven't responded to my email yet), but that it was hot tipper and photo supplier Greg Lundgren himself, as part of a RIVAL art-gang-trio with Jed Dunkerley and Jason somebody.

Are you a liar, Greg Lundgren? Confess!

I'm bruised by your strong accusations! I simply sent you a photograph of a piece of sculpture that I SAW at OSP, that bore a tag with SBC's name. I'm too old to be in a rival gang (and the Mimi Gates part is true). If I were in a rival gang with Jed and Jason, I can't imagine why we would create a piece of sculpture, sneak it into the park opening day, and give SBC all the credit. Plus, it sure does LOOK like something they would do.

I'll have to investigate this matter more on my own. I WAS doing a performance at Pacific Place that afternoon. I have an alibi and video. And where Christopher gets his information is suspicious. I guess only the security tapes at OSP could possibly reveal the truth. Curious indeed.

Greg Lundgren

Other morning-after park bits:

Photography of Paul Allen's Typewriter Eraser is allowed, regardless of the crazy signage. "That's a misinterpretation of the loan agreement," Egan says. "We thought it was right, but it wasn't that extreme, so we're taking it down."

And the Louise Bourgeois fountain will be out of commission for the next few weeks as the museum paves the plaza and puts the eyeball benches down. The plantings and the pathways down there—the rest of the park, in other words—should be finished by late February, Egan says.

When I planned my day yesterday, I had no idea that the opening day of Seattle Art Museum's Olympic Sculpture Park downtown would be far more disturbing than David Lynch's movie Inland Empire at the Neptune.

First of all, for this weekend, it is actually not Seattle Art Museum's park, but Target's own corporate park. The Target dog is dancing in the lobby of the pavilion. Stuffed Target dogs are being given away for free, so every little infant is shilling for the retailer. Almost bumping up against Richard Serra's Wake is a big, clear plastic tent with red targets on it. Inside, yesterday, a band was playing the kind of noodling jazz-lite that could turn deafness into a special power, and a sad, terribly sad, dance floor was bereft of dancers except two kids breakdancing—breakdancing to this music? Did the museum pay or otherwise cajole these kids into being performing monkeys for this event?

Meanwhile, the space itself is under some kind of spell. It's full of limitations that violate the very spirit of it. There are gates and fences and don't-touch signs everywhere. The waterfront area is not even finished—it's a pile of mud. But the worst is treating the land with such extreme delicacy that the sculptures and the plants become zoo specimens. The "ASK ME" lady that I talked to about some of this stuff said it was to accommodate the extreme crowds of the opening weekend. She said she thought some of the gates might come down this week. I hope that's true.

But I can't help but think the museum simply planned badly. If the point of the park is to allow at least a modicum of free roaming, then the idea that visitors can roam "once the plantings are established," as the lady told me, is ridiculous. When exactly will the plantings be established? And it's hard for me to trust the museum's judgment when two of the gates up now are protecting grass that is intended to be trampled into a use path. "We have to protect the delicate plantings until they are established," the "ASK ME" lady said. "When you say delicate plantings, you mean the grass that is supposed to be trampled into a use path?" I said. She moved on to somebody nicer.

I'm sorry to be belligerent about this, but the spirit of the park imparts a real overlay on the way you experience the art and the land. If the museum continues to behave as though this park is exactly like the controlled zone of a museum, or worse, like some kind of tasteless corporate-sponsored carnival ground, then the park is going to be a massive flop. I'm depressed.

(And in no state to write about the Louise Bourgeois fountain: later.)

"You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney ..." (From RK, emailed to me)

Has Paul Allen finally lost his mind, or are we going downtown? (Sorry, Curt Doughty, photographer, I didn't know, I swear I didn't know.)

Tonight is the opening party at the Henry Art Gallery for Make Your Own Life: Artists In & Out of Cologne, and what you need to know is as follows:

1. The Rodney Graham Band will be playing, from 8-11 pm! If you do not know Canadian artist and musician Rodney Graham, then it is time. Here he is now.

2. There is also something called The Book of Lists, and Factums with the artist Brent Watanabe, who recently created "the weeping illusion of a creepy puppy" at SOIL, according to Charles Mudede.

3. If the museum lets you wander in and out of the galleries, there's some great stuff to see. Albert Oehlen's ugly painting overlooking Merlin Carpenter's Make Your Own Life, a series of maddening shopping bags on the floor. More on this show later, but for now, do not miss the opening!

(Oehlen)

AND there's a "listening event and panel discussion" on Saturday at 2 at the Henry that I'm not going to miss, with Rodney Graham and the Music Appreciation Society of Vancouver, B.C. Kathy Slade and Brady Cranfield of the society and special guests Rich Jensen and Mike McGonigal are going to "trade opinions on choice picks from popular music and art." Myself, I happen to love choice picks.

This week's art podcast is about—what else?—sculpture, with Eric Fredericksen. You even get a pretty picture of the guy.

And Tyler Green is calling BS on Johanna Burton's proposal (mentioned yesterday on Slog) that the difference between installation and sculpture is that one needs you, while the other doesn't. He says all art is equally needy--or at least from Henry Moore to Thomas Hirshhorn. But doesn't some art want you more than other art? Thomas Hirshhorn desperately wants you, it seems to me. Jasper Johns could care less about you. This doesn't exist?

Hey, also, I want to announce: for those who have been looking for art and architecture posts on Slog and have had a hard time finding Charles and I on a regular basis, our Slog posts are now being routed directly to the Visual Art page of The Stranger online. Make this your new bookmark.

Richard Lacayo, the Time magazine writer on art and architecture who launched a blog recently, says the hyped Doug Aitken video thingy projected on the exterior walls of the Museum of Modern Art (it opened yesterday) is "predictable" and "sanitary".

For those who relish the puncturing of an even easier target than media darling Aitken (who showed in 2005 at the Henry), here's a good old YouTube parody of Matthew Barney's Drawing Restraint 9. (Thanks, Craigmonster!)

When I started researching this essay about the Olympic Sculpture Park, I found myself thinking, hmm, sculpture—what's that again? Nobody really uses the term much anymore. Everything is an installation. Or a site-specific work. Or multimedia. "Sculpture" was like something you buried in a trunk years ago and forgot about, and rediscovering it, taking it out, and turning it over in your hands is a surprisingly refreshing thing to do.

In a podcast that's going online tomorrow morning with former Stranger staffer and Western Bridge director Eric Fredericksen, he talks about visiting the sculpture park for an early tour with the artist Steven Brekelmans. Brekelmans has a piece called Kit Bashing in WB's new show of the same name. The piece is a drum set made of balsa wood and tissue paper. Spotlit in a corner, the drum set looks like it's just waiting for the guys in the band to come out from under the stage and play it. Yet it also looks existentially alone and unplayably fragile, the cymbals distorted by the delicacy of the materials (you can't get that metallic curve from balsa wood and tissue paper).

Walking through the park, Fredericksen says it never occurred to him that Brekelmans was a sculptor in the tradition of the sculptors in the park—several of them titans of the 20th century. Brekelmans may not have considered it, either, though at least for the time he was making that drum set, he was a sculptor. This is a symptom of the "post-medium" condition, in which artists work in any and all mediums. In this world, the term "sculptor" can be considered an insult, a way of diminishing an artist.

Artists are supposed to be defined by their ideas, not their materials, and yet the materiality of art, in truth, is going absolutely nowhere. What else is the art market other than an exchange of art objects? It's in a frenzy. And there have been recent exhibitions (Thing at the Hammer in 2005 and The Uncertainty of Objects and Things currently up at the Hirshhorn) that propose a renewed respect for the category of sculpture. They defy the conventional wisdom that sculpture, having become anything and everything in the 1960s and 70s, collapsed into nothing and died.

The brilliant writer Johanna Burton (who doesn't even let the materiality of Duchamp's readymades off the hook—an issue Rosalind Krauss skirts by categorizing them as not-quite-sculptures) takes on the brave task of defining sculpture in a Hirshhorn podcast recorded Oct. 30 called "The Current State of Sculpture." Burton contrasts sculpture today to sculpture in the "expanded field" of the 1960s and 70s:

Sculpture was not architecture, not landscape, but increasingly relying on even while challenging both. Today, sculpture may be defined as opposed to other things: a particular aptitude for troubling easy consumption, though of course hardly fully. Sculpture is not painting, one would say, or film or photography, but I actually think the contingencies between these mediums is more complex and perhaps the distinctions between them not so obvious as one might think.

Rather, I’d like to distinguish sculpture precisely from that word that it is usually assumed intimacy with: installation—installation, perhaps the most ubiquitous term in art today. Installation acknowledges the viewer as central to the work, provides or professes to provide or satisfy an experience, where sculpture continues to posit itself as central to the work. It’s glad you’re looking at it, but it really doesn’t need you.

Or, as Miami sculptor Mark Handforth said in the podcast, "installation is like taking the net off a tennis court: where’s the traction?"

Is this search for traction a retrenchment of old-fashioned ideas about sculpture? Or is it just paying attention to activity that's been going on under the noses of curators and critics for all this time but was out-shouted by the novelty of installation and the rebellious lure of mixing things up? Is sculpture coming back the way painting did? In a different way?

Uncertainty curator Anne Ellegood told me in a phone conversation why she wanted to mount a sculpture show in the first place.

Whenever things start to be a bit of an assumption—that artists are working post-studio, that they don't really make things anymore, they travel around the world and cook dinner for people, they make web sites, that’s true, and that’s interesting, but I wanted to say, what about all these artists that are interested in creating autonomous objects? What about these artists who really identify themselves as medium-specific, as 'I’m a sculptor'? What does that mean today? I think the commitment to the object is a really interesting thing. It’s a very traditional thing in some way, but today, it’s almost a riskier position to put yourself in, as opposed to being all over the place.

Thursday at 7 pm, the Frye Art Museum is using the occasion of its Erwin Wurm exhibition to talk about the state of contemporary sculpture. Rene de Guzman, director of visual art at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, is coming to talk with Frye curator Robin Held, and I'll be interested to hear whether their conversation accommodates any of this old-new tension, or simply reiterates the performative tenets of Wurm's practice, which in many ways are precisely what Ellegood means by "all over the place." Wurm's work is smart, but how does it connect to younger artists like Handforth, or Nathan Mabry or Aaron Curry of LA?

Here are some photographs by Mabry that cracked me up as I was thinking about the sculpture park, and below them, a gallery "setup" by Mark Handforth (he told me he prefers not to call them "installations").

The Olympic Sculpture Park Mania has begun. This weekend, the New York Times weighed in with a piece about the happymaking effects of Microsoft and Starbucks money. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer hit the money angle, too, dubbing Seattle Art Museum "the king of cash." And the Seattle Times has done a lot of description, and printed a very nice graphic that online turns interactive.

My sculpture park windbaggery will be coming your way tomorrow, and while I'm not going to spend the next five words summing up 4,500, I will say it has been an outrageous pleasure being obsessed with sculpture, and I hope the park gives you all the occasion to do it after it opens on Saturday.

Public sculpture has long been a losing game for artists. They have to compromise to the point of oblivion. But I can think of at least two good examples on the campus of the University of California at San Diego, which has a serious collection.

This is Michael Asher's Untitled (1991): the functional, commercial-style drinking fountain in the foreground. It is set on the axis with the American flag in the middle ground, and a granite landmark in the background commemorating Camp Matthews, a World War II training center and rifle range that occupied the land UCSD stands on now.

The piece has a wicked sense of understated humor, and it cuts to the core—using only corporate banality—of the link between violence and nationalism. The best part for me is that my late father-in-law, a brilliant Scripps marine biologist and a quiet agitator of his own—was on the university committee that accepted this piece into the collection. Jim didn't like contemporary art, and neither understood nor liked this piece, but he voted for it anyway. That seems to me the perfect spirit to hold while voting for an artwork like this. It is a necessary work. I'm glad my family was part of it.

(Perverse addendum: the fountain has acquired the reputation of being lucky, so students stop by and drink the lucky water before tests.)

But lest you think I live on conceptualism alone, here's another terrific sculpture on the UCSD grounds, and one that needs no explaining. You simply must go and nestle with it. It is 23 feet tall, and it was made of eight very large stones weighing 180 tons, in 2005. It sits in the grass and mostly giggles, though you fear it could have a tantrum right out there in front of the computer science and engineering buildings.

UPDATE: Somehow, I forgot to note that Bear is by Tim Hawkinson. Sorry!

(Perverse addendum: I would like the bear to have a tantrum all over the person who thought this PR photograph should have children running through it.)

One of the best things about the Olympic Sculpture Park is going to be the debates it inspires. And it begins!—in a heated (overheated) exchange on Artdish that I finally had to get involved in to set the record straight about minimalism, Stinger, twelve-tone music, and being a bad cop.

Here's something that, if we hadn't accidentally left it off of our listings this week, would have been double-dog starred:

Seattle artist/architect Alex Schweder continues his exploration of the permeable relationship between occupied space and occupying bodies, upcoming at Suyama Space, located at 2324 2nd Avenue in Seattle. The site-specific installation, A Sac of Rooms Three Times a Day, opens to the public on January 15 and continues through April 13, 2007. A reception on Friday, January 12 from 5 – 7 p.m. will be followed by an artist lecture on Saturday, January 13 at 12 noon. Gallery hours are Monday – Friday, 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. and admission is free to the public. With A Sac of Rooms Three Times a Day, Schweder creates a bungalow-sized, transparent vinyl envelope measuring 21' x 28' x 9' that contains four smaller forms alluding to rooms with such architectonic references as windows, doors, and interior walls. The smaller sacs, similar to the silk volumes of Do-Ho Suh and the concrete castings of Rachel Whiteread regularly inflate and deflate inside the larger envelope in a choreographed sequence. The sacs push against each other and against the interior space of the larger envelope, causing them to distort and re-conform to one another. This writhing "performance" occurs three times a day, each performance lasting 40 minutes.

Want more on Schweder? No problem. He has had two shows at Howard House this fall, this and here.

In the last week, I've been drawn in at least three times to read all the way to the end of a very, very long post over at PORT, the spectacular blog on PDX art goings-on. Led by Jeff Jahn, whose review this afternoon on the new Storm Tharp show at PDX Contemporary is worth your full attention (and which contains links to every work in the show—oh, the instant gratification), PORT has a staff of several, and they do interviews, reviews, heads-ups, and wide-ranging op-eds. I'm jealous of PORT. Very, very jealous.

Before treating you to some Tharp pics (before this, I was lukewarm on the guy, and some of the works I see online from this show still strike me as twee, but man, several knock me out, and that's more than I can say for any recent painting/drawing show in Seattle), let me note the other PORT spot you must click on: the 2006 curatorial roundup.

And now for your art treat. (For more from the show, called We Appeal to Heaven, click here.)

Storm Tharp, Einstein (2006)

Storm Tharp, Rare Bird (2006)

Storm Tharp, Jerimiah Puckett (2006)

The sculptor Erwin Wurm asks the question—or has a fat house do it for him—can an artwork be fat? (If you haven't already, check the Wurm show at the Frye.) What about, can an artwork be dead? How do you know it's dead? In this week's In/Visible podcast, up now here, we try to determine at what point Joseph Beuys's dried-up, clamped-together fat wedges and other works like it become, well, like Terri Schiavo. What about when artists put the DNR stamp on their works, and conservators ignore it? What would be the point of making a sculpture that's destined to die? Well, we keep making people, don't we? I talk to artists Tivon Rice, Susie Lee, and Mike Magrath, and writer/curator Suzanne Beal about permanence and sculpture, which really means talking about art and death. It's fun, though. Honestly.

And while we're on the subject of sculpture, there's a little early debate going on over at Artdish about the Olympic Sculpture Park. I love that it's already causing arguments.

During Artwalk Thursday night, I stopped in to see the show of 2003 abstractions by the late Drake Deknatel, who moved into figuration after that year. The movement is already afoot in pieces such as this marvelous potatoes portrait:

Some of the paintings are harsh in their sense of color—there's too much of it, simply put, so much that it hurts—but another minor annoyance is that two of the best pieces up in the gallery, both later self-portraits by Deknatel, are hanging in the restroom, instead of someplace like, say, behind the desk. This isn't the first time I've seen great stuff hidden in the back of Person's gallery.

The gallery is open Tues-Sat 11-5. I'd say check it out. If you like the self-portraits, like me, then ask Person to bring them out front. Maybe she will. The better of the two shows the artist as a smoky presence emerging from a brushy, greeny yellow background like a faded photographic subject. It's a mature, gorgeously restrained piece. And the sign beneath it refers to the toilet.

The reasons are plain. And talking to landscape architect Charles Anderson Monday, he described the three-month period of December, January, and February as the park's only vegetative "dead zone." The other nine months every year will show some flowering on the plants—red, white, yellow, blue.

Lately, people have begun asking me about this shirking of logic on the part of the museum, which basically arrived at the opening date by stumbling toward it, continually pushed forward by a series of controversies and delays and then stopping more or less haphazardly in the middle of winter. My only response is, what do I look like, the museum director? It's opening Jan. 20 and that's that. Don't want to go in the cold? Your loss.

If, like me, you are mildly irritated and yet determined to show up, a calming, warming drink might help. One of the toughest, best sculptures in the park is Tony Smith's Stinger, an enclosure of four matte-black walls in the shape of diamonds that rest on the ground on their tips. The artist named it after the ferocious cocktail disguised by its sweetness. To make a Stinger, mix 1 1/2 ounces brandy and a half-ounce white creme de menthe. Or for another version of it, keep going, and add a half-ounce vodka. It's cold out there. You'll need one after your first tour.

LA Weekly art critic Doug Harvey (a contributor to The Stranger) is not only a firebrand of a writer, he's an exhibiting artist, too. I'm having a hard time thinking of another contemporary critic working this combo. It used to happen more often, but these days, critics are academics and public intellectuals at best and half-hearted observers at worst. We're rarely experienced artists. (I'm certainly not.)

I can't wait to read the reviews of Harvey's show, titled Great Expectorations. It's showing at High Energy Constructs in LA from Jan. 13 to Feb. 18. Here's an image (a detail from Bling) and a description:

Taking the same kind and sized piece of paper, the element of eruption, and a lifetime of experience with the creative act, Harvey has made over 60 individual Expectorations—painting, drawing, collaging, erasing, oozing, and free associating, as if carrying out some sort of occasional, yet quietly consistent ritual in the studio, away from his writing desk. Historically drawing upon the visual and painterly influences of Jess, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Asger Jorn, Kenneth Patchen, Tadanori Yokoo, Peter Saul, Sigmar Polke, Martin Kippenberger ... A consistent element throughout Great Expectorations is Harvey's existential nausea filtered through a visual sense of humor.

Cheers, El Jefe.

What's a straight male Japanophile amateur photographer of pretty snowscapes to do when he discovers that the people handing out the money at the Japan-United States Friendship Commission (and at the National Endowment for the Arts, which helps sponsor the JUSFC grants) are a bunch of homo-lovers?

Why, document the dastardly gay-love of the feds on his web site, of course, where the tagline is "Hard Release: If you're not gay, it's not art."

What our hero is so upset about is that two years in a row, the JUSFC has sent gay male photographers to work in Japan. Nevermind that these two photographers, Dean Sameshima and Joseph Maida, couldn't be more different. They have taken pictures of naked men, and they have won grants, and damnit if the art world isn't so damned gay! Nevermind all the other artists on the JUSFC's list, including plenty of married-couple teams.

No, if "Hard Release" didn't win a grant from the American government, it must be because he refuses to have sex with other men. Hey, "Hard Release," the solution is simple. Real artists sacrifice for their art. Imagine the grants that would come your way if you opened your arse for business!

In response to my post yesterday about the In/Visible podcast on the soon-to-be-opened Olympic Sculpture Park downtown, B Mully forwarded this link, to a new Flickr site for photos of the park. Go, dump.

This is an entirely new breed of Seattle photography. One of the images captures something I've been noticing: that the dirty, tan-brick wall with the word BAY scrawled on it is a priceless serendipitous gift to Richard Serra's installation of steel curves, Wake. (For the full effect: scroll the photo down until you block out the glass. The wall is higher and more fortress-making than it looks here.)

The wall is on a building owned by Martin Selig, and I hope it will never be torn down, never.

Sculpture Study Group, Part I is the name of this week's installment of my art podcast, In/Visible. (In/Visible is a thing in which I talk to people about art, and they say whatever they want to say.) On today's show are the artists Susie Lee and Tivon Rice, and writer/curator Suzanne Beal, and we're discussing the Olympic Sculpture Park. All three of them took a UW class on the park. These guys are great: If you want to hear a string of thoughtful thoughts on the park (and me screwing up the architects' names in a ridiculous way), check this out.

Sculpture Study Group, Part II comes next week when the same group (plus Michael Magrath, he of the salt sculptures of Iraqis in Occidental Park recently) adds a chapter to the age-old (or at least century-old) debate about the value of permanence in sculpture.

Feel free to suggest subjects, send criticisms, whatever, to jgraves@thestranger.com.

I was thumbing through the 1992 UW Press book Art in Seattle's Public Places last night when I noticed this remarkable entry about the giant George Washington Memorial Statue at UW:

Lorado Taft was commissioned to create this memorial to the state's namesake in 1905 through the efforts of the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). The fourteen-foot-high statue was completed four years later. The price for Taft's artwork was eight thousand dollars, and when funds ran short, the DAR asked the state's schoolchildren to donate no more than five cents each. The children, and the state government, donated enough coins to make up the deficit.

After my post yesterday about Googling and being invited to a Sunday salon by Louise Bourgeois, who answers her own phone, don't you know, I've gotten so much encouragement to fly out there and just show up that I'm wondering why the hell I sat here so long. Someone even went as far as to send me a link to a cheap tickets site. And hey, after the park opens in two weeks with her fountain in it, shouldn't Seattle show up at Louise's door?

Because I need to be here in early February to help a friend birth her baby (I know, I won't be much help), I'm thinking late February. It's a beautiful time to be in New York, actually, especially if you miss the punishing weather of your Northeast childhood the way I do (pain is the cleanser). So I'll keep you posted.

Brooklyn artist Scott Andresen this morning sent me a link to an ArtNews piece from June describing the scene at Bourgeois's four-story brownstone one Sunday at the appointed hour of 3:30. Naturally, it makes me want to go even more, especially before the woman already using a walker (well, she is 95; she was born on Christmas in 1911), well, you know.

When she enters the room, everybody recites in unison, "Holy mackerel!" What a reception. And then the conversation begins, each artist describing her own work and everybody responding until they cover topics as diverse as whether fat can be beautiful, the evil didacticism of vegans, the delicacy of jewelry, and the plumpers (heavy ladies) of porn. Bourgeois mostly keeps quiet, but not entirely.

Herkenhoff suggests that Hancock read something to Louise, and he recites verse from his recent show, "The Blestian Room,� explaining that the made-up word combines "blessed� and "Christian.�

"In the Blestian room, bonuses are given out early. In the Blestian room, missionaries are positioned. In the Blestian room, text is taxed.�

Bourgeois perks up, smiling. "Sex is what?�