Links – Nut Up or Shut Up

Other news:

Just what is it that makes today’s art bloggers so different, so appealing? (image via)

Our tact, of course. ANABA art blogger Martin Bromirski offered a choice example of blogger good manners in his attack on Jerry Saltz, calling him an undead zombie for repeating himself.

Saltz responded the way class acts do when at fault, here. Yes, Saltz recycled a few comments and/or phrases. Just how big is this fault? Grand Canyon or sidewalk? In essence, he plagiarized from himself. Wholesale reintroductions of past bon mots disguised as fresh insights are a problem, but that’s not what Saltz did. It was a comment here, a phrase there. I’d like to meet the art critic who has never done something similar. When I look in the mirror, that person does not look back at me.

(Third story with zombies in it, Dawn of the Literary Mash-up from Escape Into Life.)

Jaron Lanier on why writing for the Web makes you poor, here. (Read it and weep, former newspaper staffers.)

Second link from Chicago Art Magazine, The
Rebel Sell: Why Culture Can’t Be Jammed.

Roberta Smith explores the currently high level of testosterone in art, titled, Swagger and Sideburns: Bad Boys in Galleries. Smith is in excellent form these days. Also notable is her Post-Minimal to the Max. Lead from the latter story follows:

TO paraphrase Jerry Lee Lewis, there
is a whole lot of art making going on right now. All different kinds.
But you’d hardly know it from the contemporary art that New York’s major
museums have been serving up lately, and particularly this season.

The current exhibition of Gabriel Orozco at the Museum of Modern Art
along with the recent ones of Roni Horn at the Whitney
Museum and of Urs Fischer at the New Museum have generated a lot of
comment pro and con. So has the Tino Sehgal performance exhibition now
on view in an otherwise emptied-out Guggenheim rotunda. But regardless
of what you think about these artists individually, their shows share a
visual austerity and coolness of temperature that are dispiritingly
one-note. After encountering so many bare walls and open spaces, after
examining so many amalgams of photography, altered objects, seductive
materials and Conceptual puzzles awaiting deciphering, I started to feel
as if it were all part of a big-box chain featuring only one brand.

Geoff Edgers profiles the late great director of the Rose Museum, Michael Rush. (I didn’t know he’d been an actor on Law and Order and Spencer: For Hire. No wonder he was comfortable in front of the cameras.) Real Clear Arts expands on related themes.

Rebecca Brown, gorgeous prose stylist, sings a love song to failure in The Stranger, here.

Good news: Safeco Insurance Company donates 840 works from its 2,000 plus collection to the Washington Art Consortium, a cooperative of seven Northwest museums.  Although the details in the Seattle Times’ story don’t quite add up, such as the smothered-in-PR assertion that the company is donating its artwork to prove it’s still alive (usually, the reverse is true), it’s positive that a strong regional collection will not be sold off piecemeal.

Bad news: The Department of Transportation Security plans to crack down on those who ship art by plane. It opens up the possibility that “airline employees could open carefully crated works
of art to search them the way checked baggage is sometimes searched
now, poking around Picassos instead of sweaters and socks.”