Art in the city

They're baaack...

The new AG at Justice isn't as uptight as some people used to be.

Samizdat comes back to Russia

Samizdat, Russian for self-published works, is coming back, sort of, to Russia.  Under the Soviets, Xerox machines, ditto and mimeograph machines were used to put together magazines, pamphlets, even books that couldn't be published because they fell outside the Party line.  This article in the Moscow Times talks about how a group of comic book artists have banded together to put out their own work.  Not due to political or artistic repression, but because there aren't any publishers in Russia who are willing to put out that kind of work. 

It takes a jerk...

My first thought when I read this story about someone who's stealing art to make an artistic statement was "What a pretentious jerk."  My second thought was, "This is probably a pretentious jerk who has a rich, pretentious daddy and can afford the pretentious lawyer who will argue that stealing art is art in itself."  Good luck to him and good luck to any gallery owner, artist, insurance company, and museum out there if this guy beats the rap.

I dropped my name at the art forum

This piece in the Village Voice struck me as a waste of ink and bytes.  Jerry Saltz ponders and complains about the social circles that make up the art world.  He takes a particular shot at the Diary section of artforum.com, calling it the US magazine of art criticism.  I suppose the slam of artforum.com was new, but the critique and the lament are nothing new at all.  There's always been a junior high angle to art crtitics, there always will be.  When you get down to it, any endeavor that relies on criticism (or some form of it) where the standards used to judge it are rather subjective is going to run into the you-can't-sit-at-my-lunchtable problem.  It's pretty much woven into the fabric of what the art world is. 

He is right, though.  That Diary section is a glorified version of this site.  I think it's funny that the two sites can cover the same event.  Tells you all you need to know about the "Scene".