Tonight, there will be many art openings in Pioneer Square. But there will also be a quieter event up here on the Hill at Martin-Zambito Fine Art, a small gallery that devotes itself to the relatively thankless but certainly worthwhile task of unearthing artists and artworks that have been lost to history, either by bigotry or simple happenstance paving-over.

Ida Abelman is this month's featured artist. Above is her 1930s-era print depicting a group of destitute Depression victims under that marvel of modern engineering, the Brooklyn Bridge. Her works often pit weary-looking workers against the hard-angled flash of industrial technology and design.

A good obituary is a great resource, and that's where I found most of the details of Abelman's life: her early encouragement by the critic Harold Rosenberg, her brother's devotion to Eugene V. Debs, her travels putting up murals in post offices around the country for the WPA, and the anti-Semitism she and her family experienced after they relocated from Greenwich Village to Sag Harbor in the 1940s.

According to an online history of Temple Adas Israel in Sag Harbor, where Abelman lived with her husband, Lawrence, her daughter, Margaret, and her son, Fred, the Abelmans were "proud non-believers." Lawrence was one of only four Jewish produce wholesalers in Sag Harbor during the '40s and '50s, and the family had a hard time fitting in, and getting by. After the WPA work dried up, Ida taught painting to vacationers in the summers. The rest of the year she caned chairs, refinished furniture, and took in sewing.

I wondered what her connection, if any, was to Seattle or the Northwest, until I saw listed in her obituary that her son, Fred, lives in Anacortes. Indeed, when I Google him, I come up with a phone number and address.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum has six Abelmans in its permanent collection, listed and pictured here. SAAM, and many other resources, including Abelman's obituary, list her year of birth as 1910. Martin-Zambito lists it as 1908. Amazingly, so do the online Suffolk County Death Records from Sag Harbor. Maybe Martin-Zambito corrected that bit of history, too.

I can't wait to see the rest of the show. Here's looking at you, Ida.

I was surfing through an old Martin Kippenberger survey on the Tate Modern's awesome web site this morning when I realized two things. First, the awesome web site really is awesome. For each big show, the exhibition rooms are represented on a sequence of separate web pages, each with text and multiple images. Would that all museums would take this kind of care with their web presence.

Second, I saw this current show:

Media Burn explores the boundaries between art, politics, protest and the media. It combines contemporary works with those from the 1970s and 1980s, all sharing a DIY, collage aesthetic that involves manipulating the images and techniques of the mass media.

The artist list: Ant Farm, Wynne Greenwood and K8 Hardy, Sharon Hayes—wait, go back to Wynne Greenwood. Wasn't she in Seattle last I looked? Yes, in fact, she was. Greenwood, often known as Tracy + the Plastics, the video "band" of three women, all of whom happen to be Greenwood, was in New York for a while there, but she moved back last year to the Northwest. I caught her at the opening of the Critical Line gallery in Tacoma in May, and at that point, we were playing e-mail tag, and I had to admit I'd been remiss in not writing her back sooner. We agreed we should get together, I marched right back to my computer and e-mailed her, and I never heard back. I emailed her again this fall. Again, nothing.

Wynne Greenwood, Wynne Greenwood, where are you, besides London? You don't call, you don't write. I want to talk to you, and we all want to know what's up!

For now, we'll have to be satisfied with knowing that Greenwood has a "spoof feminist news report" in Media Burn at the Tate (I presume it's pictured here in the foreground, but the museum's caption doesn't specify). The other artists in the show include Valérie Mréjen, Martha Rosler, Peter Kennard, Sharon Hayes, Jens Ullrich, and Josephine Meckseper.

Right now I'm obsessed with sculpture. Particularly the sculpture at the Olympic Sculpture Park, and also the sculpture I wish were at the Olympic Sculpture Park, which opens Jan 20 and 21.

A few months ago, in preparation for writing about the park, I wanted to see whether I could grab the unlikeliest of interviews: Louise Bourgeois, the eccentric French-cum-New York artist, born in 1911, whose every conversation sounds the way a scene from a surrealist film looks. She rarely talks to the press. The last time I remember reading anything memorable and remotely comprehensive about the artist queen was in 2002, when the New Yorker profiled her ("Bourgeois is not a dear old lady," Joan Acocella noted).

Surprise No. 1: Google "Louise Bourgeois New York" and you will turn up a phone number and an address.

Surprise No. 2: When I called that number, she answered.

Stunned, I told her who I was and what I was hoping to talk to her about: the fountain going into the park with two realistic male nudes—father and son, one always covered in a bell jar of water while the other is exposed.

"OK," she said in her accent. "Come over Sunday."

Sundays she holds her infamous salons. Could I get there by Sunday? It was Thursday at 4.

And then a man who I just know holds his lips tightly together when he isn't speaking took the phone from Louise. He said she wasn't talking to the press. Then he hung up.

Oh, Louise. What could have been. Maybe I'll call back sometime.

What do these artists have in common?

(Mark di Suvero)

(Richard Serra)

(Ellsworth Kelly)

They will all be in Seattle in January for the opening of the Olympic Sculpture Park.

This artist, however,

will not be attending said events. As Louise Bourgeois told Seattle Art Museum in response to an invitation, "I don't travel anymore, except in time." Spoken like a true surrealist.

I'm kicking myself for not having written an overview of Tivon Rice this week in light of his installation The History of Television, closing today at 4 Culture. Not because I want to rave, but because I want to understand him and his project better. More on that later, and in print, probably.

But what you still have a chance to see through Sunday is Howard Barlow at PUNCH Gallery. His safety-colored powder-coat-finish steel boxes are pocked with bullet holes; some, like Opposing Views, deliriously pull together the hot logic of a gun with the cold precision of geometric abstraction. Barlow also has a quieter series in gun-metal color, with a sheen like a silky, oily puddle that makes the tears in the steel skin more traumatic than in the neon boxes. For his floor sculptures, Barlow piles fleshy earplugs into bumpy mounds, and makes use of found animal parts—deer limbs that hunters have discarded in the woods, for instance.

PUNCH is in the Tashiro Kaplan building in Pioneer Square, at 119 Prefontaine Place S, noon to 5 Saturday and Sunday. Nate Lippens wrote a lovely full review in the P-I.

This holiday, savor the connections between this

and this

Or, between this

and this

And finally, between this

and this

This year, Tacoma Art Museum bought or acquired more than 100 works of art. Fifty-two of them are 19th-century Japanese woodblock prints, including this one,

adding to the museum's already fabulous collection of ukiyo-e prints. These were donated by Al Buck, a descendant of the US ambassador to Japan from 1898 to 1902, and his wife, Betsy. Because the family kept the prints stored for more than a century, they're in mint condition (as you can see). Their imagery ranges from scenes from the Tales of the 47 Ronin to depictions of Japanese westernization. I can't wait to see these up.

Also cool and new to the collection: three sculptures from Patrick Holderfield's recent Pilgrim show at James Harris Gallery, purchased with funds from trustee Rebecca Stewart and her husband, Alexander; works by Brian Murphy,

and Blake Haygood;

and two videos, by Ron Lambert

and Jared Pappas-Kelley.

Once you get into the business of remarking on the death of the American skyline, why, somebody will go and prove you wrong. Chicago's had its share of discussions about tall buildings lately, but that city is always on the architectural move. Now, San Francisco developers announce (thank you, as always, ArtsJournal) their plan to throw up towers taller than anything outside New York and Chicago, where the Sears Tower and the Empire State hold the No. 1 and 2 slots for highest American building:

The plan presented Thursday to the city's Planning Department envisions a cluster of thin towers rising from 2 acres at the northwest corner of First and Mission streets. The cluster would include two 1,200-foot towers, two 900-foot structures and a 600-foot companion.

This week, Dale Chihuly stopped suing people over copyright issues. He dropped the remaining suit he hadn't already dropped. This prompted Regina Hackett of the P-I to write an account of the suits and the press coverage of Chihuly in the past year on her blog.

Naturally, she reported that her writings in the P-I about Chihuly—the ones that set him as a brother to Jeff Koons and Andy Warhol—are the only ones that made any sense. What I've written has been "mean-spirited" and "eccentric." (I guess it's eccentric even to consider the questions of ownership and creation raised by a copyright lawsuit — an explicit assertion of ownership and creation — especially in light of the art world's current unquestioning approval of artist studios as thoroughly corporate structures, replete with romantic-celebrity CEOs, regardless of whether these structures are in philosophical keeping with what the art they produce purports to represent. Not to mention the class issues Chihuly's work raises ... but I digress, and I sure as hell am not going to digress into Daleworld any more this year.)

Clearly, Hackett and I are of very different minds about the conceptual underpinnings—or lack thereof—of Chihuly's work. Hey, that's what critics are for.

But there are two things you're still doing, Regina, that are really pissing me off. One, you're labeling me a hater, maybe because it's easier to dismiss me that way. If I was a hater, I'd never write about Dale. Witness my predecessors here at The Stranger. So stop it. I'm having a more interesting conversation than that. Or at least I'm damn well trying.

And two, you called Christopher Frizzelle a "creepy" man on your blog because Christopher asked whether Dale was creepy. Doesn't that make you creepy for calling Christopher creepy? Don't be such an easy target, will ya?

Now happy Xmas, damnit, one and all.

In the slightly disjointed and slightly bedraggled piece I wrote the day after returning from Art Basel Miami Beach last week, I called out Scott Lawrimore as a master impresario whose installation at the Aqua hotel ruled the day.

Yesterday, Lawrimore sent out images of said installation, complete with the bar he lugged down to Miami and stood behind, serving drinks and changing videos (showing under the bar's glass top); connective "n" sculptures by Cris Bruch, and the closet mess that accompanied Charles LaBelle's gritty LA street photo and found video. Since folks near and far have been asking me for images from some of the Miami installations (I only have images of works from galleries!), I thought I'd at least post these.

It'll be like you were there ...

That last one is a view of the Lead Pencil Studio video from their summer installation Maryhill Double, which I've written about extensively and which was a large part of why we gave Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo this year's Visual Art Genius Award. It's worth pointing out that MAN (blogger Tyler Green) is head over heels for these two Squire Parkers.

On that subject, I couldn't agree more with him. And as Betsey over at Hankblog pointed out, I couldn't disagree more with him on the subject of the "Red Eye" exhibition of LA art at the Rubell Collection in Miami. Peter Schjeldahl agreed with me in a piece The New Yorker put out yesterday. Unfortunately for me, I couldn't understand several of Schjeldahl's other conclusions (can someone please explain "money, like virtue, is as it does" and "I disliked the nineties. ... I missed the erotic clarity of commerce—I give you this, you give me that—and was glad when creative spunk started leeching back into unashamedly pleasurable forms. Then came this art-industrial frenzy, which turns mere art lovers into gawking street urchins. Drat"?).

Another Miami shout-out coming up.

Since everybody's talking today about the non-figure released from various news outlets about total sales at the main fair in Miami, Art Basel Miami Beach—$200 million to $400 million, provided by sketchy unnamed sources (who couldn't even be specific!) and not by the fair's organizers, who are staying mum on the numbers—I thought I'd provide at least one cold, hard, happy-making number coming out of Miami.

The non-profit SOIL artist collective, based in Pioneer Square and represented at Aqua Art Miami, sold $43,000 worth of art down there, according to a newsletter sent out to the members late last night. Because SOIL is a collective that runs on dues, the gallery itself doesn't get a cut of the sales. The artists made the money.

Last year, SOIL only did $14,000 in sales, and members were thrilled. (Check the podcast.) For members, it's too bad that SOIL isn't invited to be part of Aqua next year. The fair has to turn over to be fresh.

Congratulations to all the artists whose works found homes, including Claire Johnson, Satomi Jin, Isaac Layman, Susie Lee, Buddy Bunting, and probably plenty more. Now you can turn back on your heat.

UPDATE: I lied. SOIL gets 15 percent of the sales.

Or does it look more like a halfhearted commission?

I'm reserving judgment until Bourgeois's male nude fountain (drawing here) is finished at the Olympic Sculpture Park next month, but this photograph of the father-and-son figures from her studio doesn't look promising. The figures are stiff, undistinguished, and utterly unpathological. Considering Bourgeois's legendary loathing of her father and fixation on her mother, she's a strange choice for this commission. And now that the men appear to be so neutral? I hate to even ask, but could it be that the nonagenarian artist isn't, well, terribly invested in this piece?

We'll see.

So I spent last weekend in Miami looking at acres and acres of art, and I'll be putting up sometime posts on artists I got hooked on down there. I'll start local: Isaac Layman and Claude Zervas, both of Seattle. In Miami, both were at the Aqua fair, Layman at SOIL and Zervas at James Harris.

I first saw Layman's bookcase photograph in SOIL's photography survey a few months ago. It is a digital pile of images, but also a portrait arranged physically, a face with as much outward presence and inward mystery as any person's (what are the subjects of these books? why are they turned away?). And then the digital sewing begins to show. There are seams everywhere, and once you spot one, you spot them all. Does this make things fall apart or come together? Not clear. Layman doesn't have gallery representation—yet—and I'm not sure when he'll have a show locally, but I'll keep you posted. Can't wait to see more of him.

Claude Zervas has been around for a while, and done photography, more traditional (and even humorous) sculpture, and probably other mediums that I'm not even aware of. But it feels like he has come fully into his own with these light sculptures that glow and dangle and drag and are named and molded after natural Northwestern occurrences such as rivers, pasages, shoals, and nudibranches (a kind of mollusk) (can you guess which above is which?).

The delicacy and commitment to white are affecting. In Nooksack (third down), referring to the Nooksack River and in the collection of the Seattle Art Museum, Zervas lays the cords down unpreciously, but they do draw the basic curves of a river's ripples, or of the way it might meet land. The less determinate light coming from the pieces with slowly blinking LEDs is mesmerizing. Like Richard Tuttle's wire drawings or Eva Hesse's fleshy, dangling sculptures, Zervas's pieces have the feeling of utter contingency.

This charming little Moroccan landscape by Winston Churchill sold for the hefty sum of 612,500 pounds ($1.19 million) at Sotheby's yesterday.

So I'm down here in the art capital of the world this weekend, Miami, and I'm walking through Museum of Contemporary Art Miami's Goldman warehouse space, where the show Artificial Light is up, when I realize the guards seem skittish. (This is about five minutes ago; I'm writing now sitting on the curb outside.)

I turn and see blue tape across the doorway into the piece I'm approaching. It's supposed to be a pitch-black room in which the only light is the purple neon of Chilean artist Iván Navarro's Black Electric Chairs—two chairs made entirely of neon tubing that reference utopic modernist design (they're based on the Wassily chair by Marcel Breuer) and punishment.

But instead I meet a guy standing just inside the tape, waiting for a trash can to be wheeled his way.

Because minutes before, an old lady tried sitting in one of the chairs. It shattered (maybe she did, too? she was nowhere to be found by the time I got there). When the man turned on the light before the doorway was boarded up, the piece lay in pieces on the black carpet next to the other chair.

A MOCA employee in a black cocktail dress began berating a guard who sounded like he was from an African country. He said he was doing his best.

"We're dealing with the situation," said the woman at the desk, and diverted me to MOCA's other location, where the Bruce Nauman show is up that's coming to the Henry next month.

Funny aside: yesterday at the main fair, Art Basel Miami Beach, I saw one of Craig Kauffman's orange transparent vacuum-formed wall pieces—the same piece (though a different one) that mysteriously broke earlier this year at the Pompidou. And you think your work is safe in a museum ...

I wish I'd been able to ask the old woman who sat in the chair what she was thinking. Was she hurt? What's her take on the piece now? Punishment, indeed. I imagine she thought the artist intended her to sit, even though the piece is overwhelmingly visual—the neon refuses to come into focus, recommending the chair to the eye rather than the body.

Then again: You have no idea what our feet are dealing with here. There are miles and miles and miles of galleries and art to see. This accidental vandalism constitutes the protest of an exhausted fairgoer! Who knew Pinochet and Art Basel Miami Beach would come together this way?

Poor MOCA. The showjust opened this morning, and its breakout piece is Growth (Survival) (2006) by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla. It's a staghorn fern hanging in the middle of a dark room, relying for light on a row of ladders of lit messages by Jenny Holzer. Not only is it a terrific spectacle and a touching piece of work, it got me thinking it might spawn a whole new genre of recombinant art—art where artists use whole pre-existing works to create new work. I don't mean reproductions or collaborations or really even refashionings. I mean original works with original works, aura y aura. A real response from the art world to mashups.

I realize that those of you in Seattle can't see Artificial Light today. But as blogger Tyler Green has pointed out, it's basically the same show as Into Black at Western Bridge in Seattle, so head on down there. (Call first; the director is here, so I don't know about open hours.)

And now for more art ...

I admire (Jen) Graves wholeheartedly, and yet her enthusiasm can lead her to imply problems where there aren't any. Reading her, I sometimes envision a cheerleader: Ok Guys! Give me an AF! Give me an N and add a T! What's that spell? ART! (Shake of pom-poms.)

As I'm a bit of an art cheerleader myself, I warm to this tone. When I compare it to the DOA art criticism praticed at the Seattle Times, I want to shake my own pom-poms in tribute to Graves' energy and committment. Go girl go.

Posted by Regina Hackett at December 4, 2006 4:46 p.m.

Now, I hate to imply another problem where there isn't one, god knows. But for the sake of afnt in Seattle, and amity between afnt critics, can somebody tell me what this means?

UPDATE: So I just talked to Regina. She says a copyeditor at the P-I once told her she was the worst speller in the history of the paper, and she believes him. She simply meant to write A-R-T. "When it comes to me, it's Occam's Razor. The simplest explanation is the right one," she said. "I'm not Charles Mudede."

Charles laughed one of those great Mudede laughs when he heard this.

I felt sure that my problem-implying problem would have me yelling out the wrong letters as a cheerleader. I need a drink.

Mystery solved.

In today's NYT:

Five years after the fall of the Taliban, a joint report by the Pentagon and the State Department has found that the American-trained police force in Afghanistan is largely incapable of carrying out routine law enforcement work, and that managers of the $1.1 billion training program cannot say how many officers are actually on duty or where thousands of trucks and other equipment issued to police units have gone.

The answer to that question is: a coat of pinkish-purple paint covering his entire body, so he looks like a cross between Barney the Dinosaur and My Little Pony.

Yes, that is the treatment of choice by some anonymous vandals who last night painted Michael Magrath's salt sculptures of Iraqi men and boys a vomitous shade of pinkish purple. The sculptures have been standing outside in Occidental Square since September.

Magrath, who has already had to defend his sculptures from the idiots at various news outlets who called them memorials to the American victims of September 11, now probably will have to take them down before they have a chance to fully melt. They were made with a salt-based material that was intended to melt, poignantly, to nothing. In the first few months, appendages had already begun to drop off, and the effect was powerful and creepy.

This from Magrath:

I just wanted to put out that this act of vandalism is not part of the intent of the artist, who finds the alteration incomprehensible. It's not like it suggests blood or anything. That would at least have been a commentary. It's a kind of pink or plum color. Like Christo's island. It's just stupid-looking. Unfortunately the outcome is that the sculptures will likely now be removed prematurely, as they cannot be cleaned, and the effect of the paint is to alter the work beyond recognition. Other than that, the city has been so amazingly kind to these figures. I am truly astounded at the outpouring of dismay. I am working now on recasting these figures and installing them in NYC soon, btw.

I agree with the "just stupid-looking" line of thinking. The only redeemable reason for this would be if it's some kind of absurdist anti-statement-statement, and even then, the fact that it shuts down the actual function of the piece is contemptible. I'm having a bad day already, so I'm falling on the side of screw you, vandal, whoever you are and whatever you meant or didn't mean. I for one wanted to see these things melting.

Here's the sad spectacle now:

So this is what SAM was after.

Since May, Seattle Art Museum has sold $2.35 million in American art at auction, and a portion of that money went to pay for this painting, John Singleton Copley's Sylvester Gardiner (circa 1772).

In a recent conversation, SAM American art curator Patti Junker told me that major early American paintings were so expensive that they were "out of the question." I guess all I can say to that is: um, not?

Sylvester Gardiner, measuring 40 by 50 inches, pictures a physician and real-estate developer born in Rhode Island who happened to be on the wrong side of the American Revolution (which meant he fled to Nova Scotia after 1776), unlike Copley's other famous subject from his American period, Paul Revere (who comes off in Copley's portrait a bit like a hobbit).

From SAM's release:

The subject, a distinguished surgeon of admirable intellect, was a good friend of the artist's in Boston, and their warm personal relationship may account for the extraordinary human presence that this painting conveys. Copley portrayed Gardiner simply as a man of seeming curiosity and bemusement. The portrait may have been the result of a business agreement; Gardiner had sold Copley property on Beacon Hill, and perhaps Copley painted the portrait as partial payment for those lots.

Copley was widely revered as a painter in the colonies prior to his departure for London in 1774. (He was primarily self-taught, and there's an endearing strain of awkwardness to his portraiture before he decamped to Europe and joined the Royal Academy of Art in Britain.)

Of the portraits Copley painted between 1771 and 1774, "all but Sylvester Gardiner made their way into museum collections long ago," according to the museum. "This work remained, in its original frame, in private hands until its recent acquisition for the Seattle Art Museum."

Copley's lack of expressed political conviction in this tumultuous time in Boston is partly explained by his careerism as a painter. He was known as the foremost portraitist in Boston, so he strained at neutrality and painted both patriot and loyalist subjects in various manners in the years leading up to his departure for Europe in 1774. In the end, at least circumstantially, he sided with his father-in-law, one of the merchants whose stuff was dumped in the Boston Tea Party, and other loyalists, in signing a letter against the patriots' non-importation act. Copley never returned to America after he left.

The press release announces that this is SAM's first 18th-century portrait, and it is probably one of the very few Copleys on the West Coast. In those terms, it is certainly the type of treasure the museum has been promising to buy in exchange for the paintings it has sold lately, including two Hartleys, a Marin, and a Cassatt. Funds from those sales were cobbled together to purchase Sylvester Gardiner from an unnamed private collection, and donors pitched in, too, but judging from the few auction records I could find for Copley paintings (around $400,000), the museum still has plenty of money to play with in the American department.

What should I say about whether the exchanges were worth it? Two thoughts come to mind. One, I never got to see the Hartleys, the Marin, or the Cassatt, except in reproduction. (An aside: As veteran P-I critic Regina Hackett pointed out to me privately recently, the museum did have one of the Hartleys on display a few years ago, even though the museum's own exhibition records show that the painting in question had never been out of storage since coming to the museum. The museum's response to this oversight is that exhibition records only record showings that generate scholarship, or catalogs, and that they don't include permanent collection exhibitions. This, according to the museum, is standard practice in the industry. Well, so was keeping sales a secret, and that was wrong, too—so wrong that SAM has admirably changed its position and agreed to publicize its sales in annual reports. Hey, SAM, can I offer another request?: How about compiling real exhibition records for artworks? Otherwise, it's impossible to determine which parts of your collection you value enough to include in rotating collection shows over time. That's historically and culturally important, don't you think?)

Because I never got to see those paintings, and because I've never seen Sylvester Gardiner either—any more than you have—I can hardly throw out an educated opinion on which paintings are more appealing. And it's arguable whether, say, Hartley or Copley is a better and more important artist for a West Coast museum to own in the year 2006. But in most cases at SAM, the museum hasn't had to choose. It has kept other Hartleys and Cassatts, for example, and added Copley, and a whole vital segment of American history with him, to the roster.

My second thought is about museum sales in general. (In her blog, Hackett declares the subject too boring to give any time to. I'm torn; I have a secret fear that she's right, but I also find it rather a more colorful corner of wonkery than most.) Bloggers like Tyler Green and Lee Rosenbaum seem opposed to most sales on principle, and they make good arguments. No matter how good the intentions of a museum, its decisions are always based on the subjective reasoning of a particular moment in time. (There was an era, for instance, when nobody would have cared whether Hartley took a hike; now it seems nobody cares whether a regional-period Hartley takes a hike.)

Yet hanging on to anything and everything by a name artist evokes the same spirit of hero worship that drives stale blockbuster shows. Isn't this exactly what's wrong with museums?

A museum like Seattle's will never truly be encyclopedic in its collections, but that doesn't mean that historical gaps in the collection will not be glaring if the museum intends to tell certain national stories. If SAM is to have an American department, which it now has for the first time in its history, better that the holdings reflect breadth in quality instead of shooting for skewed pockets of depth. (Not that four or five Hartleys, which is how many the museum had before it sold two, could ever constitute depth.)

I, for one, am excited to see Sylvester Gardiner. The traitor.

I'm stuck sick at home and can't stop coughing long enough to fall asleep. But Bob Ross is here with me, and he says that even though viewers write in to tell him not to paint dead trees in his landscapes, he persists in painting dead trees "because they're a part of nature."

Speaking of dead trees, last night was the opening of a terrific show of new work by Seattle artist Dan Webb at Howard House. His wood carvings—of a face mask stretched and squished, of a candle full-bodied and burnt, of a grocery-store helium balloon—toy with the memorial aspects of sculpture, its presumed responsibility to mark and fight time. This is his Splash. (What appears to be a late-afternoon shadow falling on the object is in fact just the color of the wood.)

Webb is not only funny, he's smart, and he's giving a talk at the gallery tomorrow at noon. It'll be good.

Who says art doesn't have goals? Very, very, very specific goals?

A handful of Portland (and a few Seattle) artists this weekend are getting together to promote driving the speed limit.

Says (artist Joe) Macca, "Safety Dance is a one-day event intended to raise awareness in the neighborhood about the speeding on SE 41st avenue between Holgate and Steele. It's a 25 mph residential zone, but people drive 40 mph. The goal of our event is to generate interest in the neighborhood to permanently slow the traffic down. If you live on 41st and are as irritated as me, please come by to talk about it."

The event is at Joe's house in the middle of the flagrant, flagrant speed zone, 4614 SE 41st Avenue (just off Holgate), 10-4 tomorrow.

John Rockwell is leaving the New York Times. [Via Artsjournal.]

Blake Gopnik's review of the Morris Louis retrospective at the High is terrific. Read it all the way to the end; Gopnik thoroughly wrests this fascinating painter away from the cold dead formalist hands of Clement Greenberg once and for all. He makes a case for Louis as a performer, a conceptualist, and generally an action painter unlike the others. The fact that nobody knows how the suburban Louis actually made his works is a fruitful mystery.

I'm a total Louis junkie, so I'm sympathetic. The pieces just grab me. Seattle Art Museum has a single Louis in its collection, given by (who else?!) Virginia and Bagley Wright. (They showed it at their space on Dexter a couple of years ago.) It is Alpha Mu, from 1961, the year before Louis's untimely death, and it measures a glorious 8 1/2-by-13 1/2 feet. I don't have an image of it, but it is one of the ones with an expanse of blank canvas at its center. Here's another of those, and some more Louis. (And thanks, MAN.)

This is Alpha-Phi, also from 1961, at the Tate.

This is in the High show, dating the same year.

Congratulations, Rock.

Since 2001, when Rock Hushka joined the Tacoma Art Museum, he has been a champion of contemporary and regional art, having stewarded some 900 works of art into the collection, including the museum's first video pieces, of which TAM now holds 16.

I've also enjoyed the ballsiness that lurks behind his bottled-up-businessman's appearance. His shows have been some of the most daring, socially progressive, and intellectually expansive on the museum's schedule.

Every time I heard about a TAM patron being annoyed or jangled, it seemed like Hushka was the cause—in a good way. I remember the ashamed hush of the audience while he talked about ACT UP during the weekly series of lectures on political art that accompanied his small but crackling show, The New York School: The Politics of Abstraction. A visitor to his Lewis & Clark Territory: Contemporary Artists Revisit Place, Race, and Memory was so mortified at a photographer's series of idyllic forests where murders had taken place, she demanded it be taken down. Of course, it wasn't. But the art had clearly moved her.

Not all his experiments have been successful, but they've all been worth doing. He turned the museum's largest gallery into a carving studio for an entire summer for the young Puyallup artist Shaun Peterson, and the result was to have been a large figure that would stand outdoors across from the museum in perpetuity. But the log was wrong, and a replacement couldn't be found until late, and, well, who knows where that project is now. At least Peterson convinced a few people that Indians still exist, and still make art. He told me he had challenging conversations with visitors almost every day about tradition and progress.

For months after former chief curator Patricia McDonnell left, I kept hearing that TAM wouldn't hire another chief, that Hushka would be in charge of curatorial administration, that he would be first among equals, or something like that. Sounded like hooey to me. According to the press release, Hushka will "take on the responsibilities of senior curator at the museum, and will retain his former title of Curator of Contemporary and Northwest Art." That just sounds like a way of folding two jobs together, and I hate to see curatorial jobs dwindle. But maybe this is TAM's way of saying it only needs one curator, and we'll see what comes of it.

What's unfortunate is that Hushka's promotion comes at a time when the museum is doing some of the least interesting shows I've seen there. The art of Eric Carle, the children's book illustrator? Symphonic Poem: Aminah Brenda Robinson? Yuck. In both cases, the museum looks like it is pandering to a demographic rather than exploring fresh questions about art and life.

I'd like to see an expansion instead of the TAM model that goes all the way back to 1990s chief curator Barbara Johns—the one where a sense of strict discrimination is pleasantly shot through with slyness.

Ha! Made you read, Dan.

So I was just listening to Dan's podcast about a diaper fetishist and his indulgent girlfriend, and it reminded me, incredibly, of my art podcast this week with Alex Schweder, an artist whose permanent public installation in the bathroom stalls at the Tacoma Trade and Convention Center is the most transgressive piece of public art in this state, if not in any state. (It follows another piece he did in the bathroom at the Museum of Sex in New York, which isn't half as disturbing.)

Here's an embarrassing (for me) old photo from before the paint tape was removed from Lovesick Walls in Tacoma, and another final installation detail.

Listen to the podcast if you want to hear the eloquence behind Schweder's disquieting work.

Here's the portrait Billy Sullivan did of her in 2002

and, according to her web site, she wrote a opera (it opened in 2004 in New York) called Hell and is working on a novel called The Inferno about the hell of being a female poet.

Travis Nichols's great piece today about being on the road with the wiry punk queer poet Eileen Myles reminded me of a couple scrambled eggs I ate with the marvelous Myles one morning.

I'm pretty sure it was at a Denny's in Auburn, and I'm guessing this was three years ago. I was interviewing Myles, who has a burned-out voice like Patti Smith, after she finished talking poetry with a class of high-school kids. I don't remember much of what we said, but I remember that it was raining heavily and I felt surprisingly at ease. I have the distinct suspicion that she treated me as an actual person to eat breakfast with, not a journalist. That's probably why I don't remember much: it was a real conversation, not one for posterity. It's a good memory. She's a warm, funny, and upstanding (a strange kind of word to use on her, maybe, but I think it's right) woman.

You can hear her talk here with another interviewer (the inspirational Paul Nelson) about the queer kids in Auburn, about how Allen Ginsburg tried to fix her up with his boyfriend, and about the spiritual moment that began her career, when she wrote a poem at her day job, looked down at the poem, and realized, "Oh, this is real. The job is not."

Here's her web site.

In today's paper, I write about The East River Project by the artists Gretchen Bennett and Yann Novak, a walking tour of Seattle's International District set to a progression of neon orange street stencils and the downloaded sounds of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I called the story The Invisible District of Brooklyn and Seattle.

What I didn't realize is that the neighborhood now known as the University District was once the town of Brooklyn.

In 1890, when Seattle's super-developer James Moore laid out part of the Brownfield farm for a townsite, there was no assurance that it would become a satellite to a school (Territorial University, later University of Washington). The then still primeval land of section 16, east of 15th Avenue, was reserved first as a resource for the University. It might have been sold to support the building of the school elsewhere. The easterner Moore called his new addition Brooklyn. It was a stretch for although this Brooklyn like the one in New York was situated "across the water" from the larger community, Lake Union was a much wider water than the East River in New York.

(Thanks, Jack Straw arts manager Van Diep!)

My column this week reported on the Seattle Art Museum's sale of $1.35 million in art—two Hartleys and a Cassatt—last spring.

Turns out that sale was not an anomaly. According to the Sotheby's November sales catalog, SAM is aggressively pruning its American collection in the hopes that clearing out the weeds will make way (dollars-wise, that is) for better, bigger purchases.

As is apparent by searching the Sotheby's web site, and as was reported first this morning by the Seattle Times, SAM stands to gain $1 million or more this month in profits from the sale of American art at Sotheby's. (SAM may also be selling work through other channels that don't have public search functions, but in reporting I've been doing since August here, here, and here, the museum has refused to disclose any information about other pending sales.)

The money will be used to buy more American art, but the museum isn't saying what major purchases it has up its sleeve.

According to the acquisitions list in the museum's 2004-'05 annual report, the only recent American gain, on a long list of African, Asian, decorative arts, modern and contemporary, Native American, and Olympic Sculpture Park gains, was a 10 3/4-inch by 7 7/8-inch oil on wood pulp paperboard work by Thomas Cole from circa 1845-1847, titled A Sketch: Catskill Landscape.

The only other category with just one acquisition listed is European painting and sculpture, which, like American art, is a weak area for SAM. Leonardos and their like are nearly priceless, so SAM can't pool enough resources to really alter its European collection. But obviously, the museum believes it can make headway in the department of cheaper and more available American art.

Is that true? And does SAM have its eyes on a particular prize? The museum isn't saying. My calls to American art curator Patti Junker today—and last week, when I asked to talk with her about the way the Hartley and Cassatt sales fit in to the larger picture—have gone unreturned. (To be fair, I understand Junker is out sick today, and I will report again after I hear from her.)

The prize had better be worth the sacrifice, said Seattle art dealer David Martin of Martin-Zambito Gallery, which specializes in late 19th- and early-20th-century American art. That hasn't always been the case at SAM, he said. He recalled sales in recent years of a painting by John Singer Sargent and a drawing by Mary Cassatt that were replaced by what he believes to be inferior examples of the artists' work. (SAM sold a signature mother-and-child Cassatt and purchased a portrait of the artist's brother that Junker has described as a "landmark" work, but which Martin says "looks like a taxidermist did it.")

The reason museums hate talking about sales is that not everybody agrees on what's dispensable. Hartley lover and scholar Patricia McDonnell recently said the loss of the two Hartleys this past spring is no tragedy. She referred to them dismissively, as "bad days at the office" for the artist, which seems to align with their slim exhibition history.

What's the comprehensive history of SAM's deaccessions? To some extent, it's publicly unknown, because the museum didn't decide to publish sales until I asked it to this summer, and it still hasn't come out with any, because its annual report is not expected again for several months. The history that can be gained is spotty and anecdotal.

In 1989, according to a report of museum activity written in 1999 by a museum employee (and passed to me by a source who has asked to remain anonymous), SAM got rid of nine American oil paintings by William Mason Brown, William Merritt Chase, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Thomas Doughty, Jonas Lie, Frederick Judd Waugh, John Singer Sargent, Guy Wiggins, and Irving Ramsey Wiles. Then-curator Patterson Sims "judged these paintings either second-rate or in poor condition," the report reads. "The museum realized $468,970.00 and the money was placed in a fund for the acquisition of American art." The money was used to purchase three works: the stained-glass window Peonies in the Wind with Kakemono Borders by John La Farge; the landscape Mount Rainier, Washington Territory by Sanford Gifford; and the Cleveland Rockwell seascape Smoky Sunrise, Astoria Harbor.

Asked to respond to this exchange, Martin says he finds it hard to believe that the La Farge, Gifford, and Rockwell were worth giving up the Chase, Cropsey, and Sargent for—and he wonders whether they were sold at auction, given the relatively low profit for those household names—let alone the whole compendium of names, some more obscure.

Speaking of obscure names, take Hovsep Pushman, the Armenian-born American painter of orientalist scenes who died in New York in 1966. Three Pushmans are on this month's block at Sotheby's, and a search on SAM's web site indicates "no results" under Pushman's name. Is SAM getting rid of Pushman altogether? No one's claiming that Hovsep Pushman was a genius, but is SAM aiming for just a greatest-hits collection? Is Pushman's orientalist link to SAM's world-renowned specialty, Asian art, for example, immaterial?

The eight American paintings now on the block include a few that Martin says it will be a "mistake" to get rid of, including John Marin's 1934 oil painting New York Abstraction (valued at $600,000 to $800,000),

Preston Dickinson's 1928 oil painting Still-Life No. 1 (valued at $150,000 to $250,000)

and the Pushmans, including The War God (1953, valued at $30,000 to $50,000).

Or an artwork of a toilet that flushes to the sound of the Italian national anthem, anyway. Next up: arresting those humming the anthem while on the loo. [Via.]

Here's more of and on Charles Négre's series of 19th-century photographs taken in the Imperial Asylum at Vincennes, the hospital that industry-conscious Napoleon III created to give injured workers the same care as military veterans.

This insanely cool video was posted on Hankblog this morning. It's a short film of the artwork I raved, slobberingly, about, a few short weeks ago when it was at 911 Media Arts Center.

Thursday it opens at the Henry. I dare you to watch this video and not want to go to see the floor piece.

Just now up on the Henry's Hankblog is the announcement of tonight's opening, Take the Cake: Celebrating Stranger Genius Award Winners, 2003-2006, which started at 5.

This new piece by Susan Robb is part of the show

so I dialed the number, and this is what I heard Susan say to me:

Please write the following words on the wall in front of you: "I am not here. This isn't happening."

It's mortifying being a Genius.

Rob Clarke is 42 years old has been married for 5 years and has a two year old daughter. He has a long history of drug addiction and has been clean for 12 years. He works for a Mortuary as a Cremation Technician. He is a painter. At a early age he made a commitment to being an Artist.

These are the facts, but art is not a fact.

This arrived in my email inbox this morning. It's for Rob Clarke's show of paintings at Art Not Terminal gallery starting Dec. 9. I can not vouch for Clarke's work, only the sheer rhetorical force of his press release.

Speaking of charmers, just hours after this email arrived I got a phone call from a lovely Frenchman with a thick accent who makes paintings and photographs of pink socks. "This is a way to walk on the earth with happiness and joy," he said, adding that he has shown the work in Canada and Paris before bringing it here.

His opening is 7 pm tomorrow at Cafe Allegro, including the screening of a movie called "The Mystery of the Pink Socks," which a friend of the Frenchman's who works in French television made for him, he said.

I thought it was all a put-on, but no. Philippe Moncorgé is very much for real. This is his web site. Sadly, I could not find any images of the socks themselves, but I did find a listing for the show, titled Pink Socks of Earth.