Links - give them back, you imperalist bully

Elgin Marbles: Remember as a child when some thug who'd stolen your lunch said possession is 9/10's of the law? It still is. Culture Grrl has the story on how the English continue to disgrace themselves, here. Don't they want to prove there is progress in human affairs? No. They want to hold on to a tourist draw.

Germaine Greer: The doctor is not in, but I feel confident in saying this woman is crazy. She used to be deranged about sex, and now she's nuts on art. She's also a pleasure. Here she is on why nuclear cooling towers are more compelling as art than art, and better than nature. (Trees? She's sick of them.)

If she were talking about Vanessa Renwick's images of a cooling tower near her home town, Greer would have a point. More Renwick on her Web site: Oregon Department of Kick Ass. As many times as I've typed that title, I never grow tired of typing it again. To paraphrase what Mark Anthony said of Cleopatra, age cannot wither the Oregon Department of Kick Ass nor custom stain its infinite variety.

A realer reality: Blake Gopnik in the Washington Post, here.

The real always has been important territory for artists. The difference now is that while most of the more arty, "imaginative" options are looking tired, the "new realism," if we dare call it that, seems to be gaining ground. It's as likely to tweak and distort the world as to record it faithfully. It digs more deeply than ever before into what reality, and its documentation, can mean to us.

More arty options look tired? Which options are those? Such generalizations, so attractive to critics, betray an inability to be specific. Art's specifics eat holes in the blanket of the general, and weaselly words such as "most" and "seems" cannot provide a patch.

Still, Gopnik's essay offers a good list of artists backed by his adequate descriptions of their work. Too bad there are no links or images. Presumably, the senior art critic at the WP doesn't have time to make what he writes minimally useful online. It's another example of mainstream media committing suicide.