I'm enjoying the first day in a long time without any pressing and immediate deadlines. No illustration jobs, no wedding video. I have a book design job coming up around the corner, but I've decided to give myself the night off.

Meanwhile, the wedding in 'Frisco was awesome. Some drama with a chauffeur who got lost, but otherwise everything pretty much went down as planned. Including the video, which played to rave reviews. Of course, you can't wrong with cross-dissolves and a beautifully schmaltzy soundtrack infused with the likes of Natalie Merchant.

I stayed with friend of a friend Scott who is pretty much always drunk. His roommate lent me a shirt when I was caught off guard by the formality of the rehearsal dinner. (No one in Austin dresses for anything...ever.) It occurs to me that this is the first wedding in my adult life I've ever been a part of that's the full deal--rehearsal, big white dress, fancy cake, etc. Not that I'm into big, expensive parties, per se, but really it's nice to be at a ceremony and think, "ok, these two, they really mean it," as opposed to what I often find myself thinking: "ok, if this shit doesn't last through the end of the year, I want my present back."

Caryn Coleman and Tyler Green among others frequently grouse about the scant attention paid to non-New York artists by the mainstream art press. They often talk about the "outdated" notion of New York as the center of the art world. I'm inclined to agree. If I didn't already agree based on the uninspired dreck that fills Artform every month, then my recent trip to New York cemented that idea.

New York still maintains power in this one way: its sheer hulking weight sits like a geriatric walrus on the psyche of the art world pulling everything into its orbit, buttressed by generations of fusty, institutionalized pseudo-counterculture and an endless appetite for tasteless academic masturbational excess. The power of New York is like the power of England's royal family: mainly illusory, held together not because of anything they do or say, but through the sheer collective will of a people desperate for symbols, hungry for the idea that something great hovers above to give their lives meaning.

Stripped of its mostly outdated reputation, New York is reduced to what it really is: a numbers game. Just more people stacked up together, no better or worse than Cleveland or Seattle, just more of them.

So if New York is an illusion, where's the center of the art world? London? That's been over for years it seems. Saatchi's looking pretty played out and that warehouse fire, if not apocolyptic, did at least feel uncomfortably symbolic--and sad--as the passing of an era.

According to this article, the future is in China and India. Beijing? New Delhi? That's hard to imagine. But 70 years ago it was hard to imagine that the center of the art world would be somewhere other than Paris. The road to Bombay may not seem as clear as the roads to, say, Iran, Mexico or even somewhere between Prague and St. Petersburg, but that doesn't mean it's not there.

So if London is the past and China is the future (and New York is the distant past), where's the center now?

Cyberspace? Some have been claiming that for a decade, but it still hasn't quite materialized. The digital realm is still a hinterland--maybe the most interesting hinterland, but a hinterland nonetheless. It's an adjuct marketplace of storefronts, a Wild West of gathering shadows, but still very much in the rough. Given a choice between being seen online versus being seen in their local gallery, most artists would still choose the gallery, right or wrong. And digital artists are to the 00's what hippies were to the 60's--symbolically central, but socially marginal. When curators have to put their money where their mouth is, it still mainly comes down on those who work in the physical world: sculptors, installation artists, analog conceptualists.

So what does that leave? No place really. Which leads me to ask: who says we need a center anyway? What do we gain by having an art world center?

Here's the danger of crowning China as the future home of all things art. It engages that same insider/outsider rhetoric we've always fallen victim to. It looks at the art world as a zero-sum game in which some people are "in" it and some people are "out" of it. That's why the Whitney curators don't seem to understand that the US doesn't end at the Mississippi River, much less at the Hudson. That's why kids go tripping over themselves to move into a closet in New York to produce alongside a slew of so-so artists in much, much more expensive studio space than they had in Sacramento or Savannah. They all assume that if they are not there then they are nowhere. And it's that belief that keeps the whole system running.

The idea of a centered artworld is imperialist at its heart. It goes along with the idea that a small, centralized cadre of intellects can and should dictate to the rest of the world how things ought to be done. And the rest of the world undergoes a kind of Stockholm syndrome and dutifully lies down to have her own mind raped by her powerful overlord.

Maybe we are in a decentralizing moment. Maybe there are a network of nodal centers passing along ideas, influence and information rhizomatically from point to point. Given the way populations coalesce that's not likely to last long, but that is one worldview the Internet has given us; a way of imagining the world as decentered and in some inchoate way, radically democratic.

Which brings me back to cyberspace. Maybe if it isn't the center, it can at least be a map.

Catching up on 5 days' worth of email and phone calls takes much, much longer than it should.

Wedding video finished with time to spare. Now off on a 6am (!!) flight to San Francisco. Will probably be too tied up to see any art, but that remains to be seen.

Back in 2002 (?), just as war fever was taking root, Flo Wong and I threw a house party where we got a bunch of people together to write letters to members of congress, the president, Colin Powell, etc. in an effort to change the war tide. We know now that that train was unstoppable, but doing something beat doing nothing.

Last night, Flo threw an Outfoxed party where we stuffed our faces and watched the Moveon.org movie that debunks Fox News. Then there was a national web-based conference call with some political types, including Al (Blowhard) Franken. The whole thing was energizing and I quash that cynical little part of me that says it's all futile and what's the point anyway?

So now I return to finishing the nostalgia video for Kendalle's wedding, which I have to finish tonight, so I can have a full day to work on exporting it correctly. It'll be an all nighter, made worse by the fact that I can't just do a simple slide show and leave it at that. Oh no, I've got to have arty little transitions dazzling (yet subtle) special effects, etc. I have a feeling it's going to get real simple right toward the end though. (I would have included a still from the video, but Blogger has once again changed their posting interface I can no longer find the file uploading button...)

1. Ventana Del Soul--The south Austin nonprofit community center. 30 years' worth of National Geographics on sale for a buck each, computer "lab" that's basically just a pc and a comfortable chair, and the best coffee house south of Riverside. Someone finally figured out how to do left-leaning grassroots community building without it being a disorganized mess.

2. Peat Duggins's Super desk (in progress)--It takes up half a room and does everything but fold laundry. James Bond meets Bob Villa.

3. Lama Li sketchbooks--the right size, the right shape and once you get over the "precious" paper, they do a fine job.

4. Mat Gleason's unvarnished, uncompromising, bombastic, totally biased, self-destructive truthtelling about the art world.

5. Rachel Koper--who's appearance a few weeks ago on Austin now reminded me how much better off this city is for having her.

As I've written before, I am getting more serious about sketching, in both the realworld and digital realms (as here for example). How does one put all these different kinds of thinking--visual, verbal, formal, informal--in one place and let them talk to each other and make connections? This is a new problem for me as I've normally been the kind of person to keep all these things separate, notes here, sketches there, etc. I'm looking forward to figure out more ways to mix them all. (left, old sketchbook drawing, 2002)

current music: Stevie Wonder, Songs in the Key of Life

As of tomorrow, the hated vocabulary illustration job is officially complete. I'll be sending off the final artwork and getting the payment. Check another one off the list.

current music: David Garza, Kingdom Come and Go

Peat and I hung out the other night. I'm getting old now and it takes me 3 days to recover from one night of getting to bed at 1:30 and getting up at 6:00 in the morning. Not even a true all-nighter. So needless to say, we had a great conversation, which was the only reason I'd screw up my sleep schedule so egregiously.

Without rehashing everything we talked about, it was interesting to get his take on how he came to doing art. It made me realize how different it was from my own experience. As a kid (nor as an adult), I never really had any visual epiphany where I saw some work of art and said, "I want to do that." It was more like I've always had this drive to communicate, to share a certain way of ordering reality, and then I looked for an effective way to do that: visual art. So while I love making art, it isn't in fact necessary to me, strictly speaking. If I didn't paint or draw or do digital work, I'd write, or I'd play music, or whatever. (Which I guess explains why I still do all of those every once in a while.) The experience of communicating is central for me, the language through which that happens is secondary.

My site of the Month: Canto do Brasil. Spend some time there.

Speed Roi 1, 2 & 3

current music: Radiohead, OK Computer

Dan at Iconoduel is back from New York. Loved the Met, was as unimpressed by Chelsea as I was.

If you can get through all the invective and bad spelling, Mat Gleason usually has pretty good advice for artists. This edition: get off your ass and paint, damn you!

In a stunning development, Steve Kurtz, whose art landed him in trouble with the FBI because they couldn't tell it apart from germ warfare, has been indicted along with another guy last Tuesday. Either there's more going on here than we know, or this is the most bungling and transparent face-saving manouver ever. My money's on the latter.