Last Saturday I attended the Contemporary's panel discussion on The Atlanta Art Scene. Discussions like this usually cause people like this guy to engage an involuntary gag reflex. And normally, yes, a discussion of the Atlanta Art Scene with more than 3 people in the room is usually an invitation to oscillate between poles of rage, despair, and bemused humor. But in this case, I found the talk refreshingly non-whiney. I hand most of the credit to moderator Andrea Barnwell Brownlee for setting the right tone.

So here in a nutshell are highlights from the panelists' main points, distorted I'm sure by a week of misremembering:

Jiha Moon, artist--We're in a global world and, New York City aside, making art here is pretty much like making art anywhere else. Also, people hide away in their private camps and you have to seek them out.

Cathy Fox, critic--Atlanta needs a kind of high-end Kunsthalle. The Contemporary is almost it, but not quite. Meanwhile, say goodbye to the long form critical review at the AJC. It's gone and it ain't coming back.

Andrea Barnwell, curator--Go out and see art before you complain about what is and isn't available.

Sam Romo, gallery owner--Market's down, gotta work harder. But on the upside, 5 Atlanta galleries got invited to Scope last year. Up from 0 five years ago.

Toward the end of the Q & A period, someone brought up Atlanta's bias toward 2D art. And while the official, panel-sanctioned answer was that there is other stuff out there--installation, sculpture, performance, new media--I had to agree with the commenter. We're full up on painting, drawing, photography, and even sculpture, what Sam Romo calls the "cash and carry" stuff with lugubrious air quotes.

There's nothing wrong with that stuff; after all it's the stuff I make. But still, where are the spatial interventions? The integrated performances? Where is the art that fucks with the architecture that encases it? (I remember a sculpture at the Austin Museum of Art that pierced the wall--the motherfucking wall!--and through a series of pipes, siphoned off water from the fountain outside to repurpose it in the entrails of the sculpture.) Where is the multi-site stuff, the projects that unfold over time--not in seconds, but in days or years? In short, where is the art that doesn't resolve down to a series of discrete objects displayed on a wall or ranged on a shelf? It's an important part of the ecology that appears here and there, but is all too underrepresented.

That's one optimistic title you got there....(I kid I kid)

Spill it! You know you are dying to say some shiznit!