I'm on the late train here, but the art-blogosphere is all abuzz over Art in America's recent listing of 10 important(?) art blogs, who made the cut, who didn't. Well, I'm pleased to announce that writer Rubinstein saw fit to include Electric Skin on the list.

At first I was pissed off that unlike all the other blog descriptions, my name was not associated with it as the creator. Then I remembered how I intentionally took my name off the site so that I wouldn't be pigeonholed as a journalist. My marketing background comes roaring to the fore.

I'll also join the chorus by saying that a list of 10 is just too short a list and that Tom Moody, Franklin Einspruch's Artblog and Zeke's Gallery could just as easily been on the list, among others.

current music: Radiohead, The Bends

Andy Goldsworthy is sublime at the Austin Museum of Art. As an artist, I invest heavily in permanence--Goldsworthy refreshed me, at play in the garden of impermanence, fleeting impressions, mortality. Ah, our little museum. I love you AMOA.

I attended the opening with Jenny, my partner in crime from Philadelphia. "What if I had a little too much to drink and fell right into this sculpture?" she said looking at the intricately patterned sticks and branches laid out in a 12-foot circle on the floor. "Would they have someone special come and fix it back up?" Nah, they'd call my boy Eric who helped hang the show to begin with--and I'm guessing he was half toasted through the whole process, cause it looks that good.

Meanwhile, I'm in the home stretch on the first phase of the book project. Proofs due tomorrow, but I'm feeling woozy from the drying paint on my living room walls. Kazki, Paul and I painted last weekend--the color of raw cookie dough, buttery pancake batter. You just want to eat the walls. We played early Prince records, and my next door neighbor came over, knocked on the door and said, "Uh, I'm sorry, can you please turn your music up?" I like this neighborhood very, very much.

I sold my table finally, and now I am down to nearly nothing. Okay, by world standards I'm still loaded (after all, I still own not one, but two computers!). But by Western standards? Just enough to be a little comfortable, a little kind to myself, a little free.

In an attempt to get more out of all the physics books I've been reading and to aid in the design of my time machine, I've been dabbling in a little calculus. Again, Half-Price Books comes to the rescue with an elementary calculus primer.

So I get stuck on one problem yesterday and I go in at work at ask the statistician (who's from China) to help me out with it. She looks at the problem and says, "Oh, there's no solution. It must be a misprint. There's no way to solve that equation." Cool. So now i'm feeling vindicated and justified.

Then she comes in today and says, "I thought some more about that problem and I realized I was wrong. There is a way to solve it." She looks at me sweetly and embarrassed. Then she says, "See, in China we learn this in about 6th grade, so it's been a while and I forgot some stuff. But now I remember."

6th grade!! Most of us stateside don't get around to this until...um let's see...never. That explains so much about that pesky trade deficit.

Martin Bromirski said exactly what I was just thinking here. We can either cry and moan and wait for Michael Barnes at the Statesman to pay a decent amount of attention to the local Austin art scene (a day on which the Stanley Cup finals will also be held on an ice rink in hell). Or we can realize that we already have the means, the method and the power to create our own art network, as some have already started to help create. (Looking sideways at Prentiss).

In other news, I finally read the interview with Charles Saatchi in the Art Newspaper where mere mortals emailed in questions for him to answer. He came across as brutal and abrupt, but also sharp-minded and thoughtful. And frankly, it made me like him a whole lot more than I would have thought based on the endless caricatures of him written up in the arts press.

In case you don't have time to read the interview, I've summarized it here:

Q: Don't you think you should be a silent, guilt-ridden art snob who's vaguely neurotic and embarrassed about his own wealth and power, just like most other megarich art collectors?

A: No. Goodbye.

Current reading: Just finished Clifford Pickover's Surfing Through Hyperspace, a primer on the 4th dimension, what it looks like, where it is, and how higher beings in the fourth dimension could exist literally inches away from us in a universe we cannot perceive.

Just started Brian Wood's graphic novel, Channel Zero, full of the rueful political invective I had in spades back in my New York culture wars days.

Becoming very "meta," this article from today's ArtsJournal caught my eye: Istvan Kantor goes to war with Jeff Koons. Jesus H... Who to side with in that struggle? That's like Enron suing Shell Oil, I just don't want either one of them to win. To top it off, the journalist mistakenly identifies the Koons sculpture as a Paul McCarthy work. Too many layers of irony... can't breathe...

I especially like when Kantor refers to his recent honor by Canada's National Gallery as "a revenge for me. My work was always anti-establishment, anti-art art, anti-authoritarian and now, suddenly, I have been recognized by the same people who at certain times put me in jail."

If he did indeed say this (after being interviewed and misquoted several times, I'm highly dubious of attributed quotes in the press), it's one of the most witless positions I've read in a long time. Check it out Istvan and similar cookie-cutter posers: when you've built your whole identity on being against something, only to have that something turn around and suddenly admire you without transforming itself in any way, it means that you've failed, not succeeded. That's one of the many problems with artists who define themselves through a series of negations. The scorned entity always has all the power.

I've caught up somewhat from back-to-back cross-country trips and can finally give a short Philly report. The bottom line: if we have to vote an American capital of art to replace the increasingly fusty and self-satisfied New York scene, my vote goes to Philadelphia. Does the overall quality of new art exceed New York's? Maybe, maybe not. But the scene also doesn't labor under the same excess of pomp and pretense--so the net result is a better experience overall.

Take for example, Philadelphia's obsession with public art. I say amen. Everywhere you turn, murals, public sculpture, challenging and interesting art in hotel lobbies. Hotel lobbies, for crying out loud! And even though Rik, the guy I met at that lovely shit hole bar McGlinchey's can't stand those "damn pink obelisks," I still say they beat the hell out of any other U.S. city's commitment to public art. Ten minutes of that conversation and I pulled out my trump card: Austin's embarrassing $60,000 Lamar Boulevard public art fiasco consisting of...oh whatever, it's so lame it's not worth describing. See it for yourself here (it's the picture in the middle, and yeah, that's all there is...) (right, unattributed sculpture in lobby of Lowe's Hotel)

Speaking of McGlinchey's, one of the waitresses--Sarah Stolfa--has a show at Drexel University featuring photographs of the bar's regulars. Her work seems both poised and psychologically penetrating. It has also been featured in the New York Times Magazine. Some big contest. Don't remember all the details since I was on my 4th beer when Rik told me about it. (left, Sarah Stolfa, "Robert," 2004)

Rik, by the way, was actually Rick, but changed his name in high school. He's working on an experiment to preserve his lungs by "smoking" them with cigarettes the same way meat is preserved by smoking it. Good luck with that Rik. He also says hi to Anna his lost love here in Austin.

This is something I love to do; go around to foreign cities on these quick work-related jaunts and meet locals. I did the same thing in Chicago last year, just before I started this blog and am still in touch with one of those cats. Did the same in Atlanta 2 years ago. Wish I'd known Kojo at the time. (left, Stephen Beyer, Untitled, 1992, reminded me of Peat Duggins and Salomon Huerta)

Unfortunately, I was ill-prepared this year, which is why I just missed Libby Rosof and Roberta Fallon at the Spector Gallery opening on the 19th. Actually, we were probably there at that the same time, since Carie, the co-organizer of the show said that they had "just left" when I talked to her half an hour after arriving.

Maybe next year, but it was an ok show anyway. The show featured artists reinterpreting a whole range of masterworks from the full range of art history. Interpretations ranged from exact copies, including the original signature, to all manner of abstraction, tinkering, joking and mocking. I was intrigued by Jim Houser's take on Cy Twombly, though nothing else particularly blew me over.

Then I looked at Houser's work online, what is apparently his more typical work, and I'm pretty sure I saw it, or something very much like it, earlier this year at Camp Fig and hated it. Paradoxically, I felt much less affronted by what I saw online. (right, Jim Houser, "Local Charm," 1999.)

That confirmed my suspicion that many of the problems I've griped about with contemporary art are not artist problems so much as curatorial problems. When a single artist evokes the whole I-just-don't-give-a-shit, nothing-really-matters ethos, there's at least a chance of receiving it as a genuine expression. But when you lump together 25 artists all doing I-just-don't-give-a-shit in a space that does I-just-don't-give-a-shit month after month, then it comes across as hackneyed and insincere trendwhoring. And that's all I'll say about that for now.

Philadelphia was, all-in-all, quite a success. Oh, and some have asked: the reason I was up there was to man a booth at a conference on Speech-Language Pathology. Yeah, I know...WTF? That's why I had to get away every night to McGlinchey's, to Dirty Frank's to pound on the tables in unison with the whole bar and listen to some dude's rambling story about taking trains all over Japan, and to that skateboard shop that was also opening a show the same night as Spector Gallery.

Back in Austin now, I'm gearing up to make massive revisions on the book project, which yes, has nothing to do with making art and is killing me because of that.

UPDATE: Reading one of the reviews of the Spector show posted at Fallonandrosof made me realize I should have mentioned Kate Moran's teensy tiny Piero della Francesca. It was a jewel.

current music: Flaming Lips, Do You Realize?