Best of 3 has the best take on the news that Shaquille O'Neale will co-curate a show titled, Size Does Matter:It would be so easy to just poke fun, or dismiss this as a publicity stunt. But you know what? The sun's shining, I'm feeling generous, and I'm going to say that maybe Shaquille O'Neale has a genuine interest in art and his co-curation of a show for the Flag Art Foundation is a mutually enjoyable and beneficial enterprise.Titled 'Size Does Matter', the show has a line up of artists who I wouldn't kick out of the gallery for eating … [Read more...]

Sean Flood, 3 Deka, oil/canvas. With relatives living on all three floors and holy water in the parlor. I was born in Boston. Were it not for the restless mobility (and dread) of my parents, I might be there still, as I tend to bloom where I'm planted. … [Read more...]

has her own light. (Via) … [Read more...]

Kenny and rives travel to ask a single question: What do you want to do before you die? They ask participants to write the answers on a Polaroid portrait, which they post on their Web site. (via) This project and plenty like it owe a lot to Gilliam Wearing, and before her, to Jim Goldberg, neither of whom tends to make it to the credit line. Their ideas have spread beyond them, influencing even those who've never heard of them.Gillian Wearing, from Signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what someone else wants you to … [Read more...]

 Heather Cook, 2008, viaThe brothers Eli Hansen & Oscar Tuazon, Tent, 2008 … [Read more...]

In the art world, there's a remarkable outpouring of support for U.S. soldiers fighting on two fronts. Their government under Bush & Cheney lied its way into Iraq. Afghanistan was an afterthought. However justified a military response might have been for the latter, the result is a mess. Increasingly, the idea that there are better ways to win hearts and minds is gaining ground.In the late 1960s, soldiers coming home from Vietnam  rarely found anything but contempt from artists addressing the war. (He's the universal solider and he … [Read more...]

The two best art critics still employed by a U.S. newspaper who don't work for the New York Times are both in California: Christopher Knight at the LA Times and Kenneth Baker at the SF Chronicle. There are no art critics on staff at daily newspapers in Seattle, Chicago, Miami, Dallas and Houston, among others. The admirable Douglas Britt works for the Houston Chronicle on contract. Even though he has the output of two staffers and has brought the paper back into the national discussion, the Chronicle has not said it will restore the position.A … [Read more...]

By giving to and buying from Suyama Space's garage sale. Donated objects include fancy chairs, tables, china, fiesta ware, silver, architectural accessories, toys, tiles, textiles, art objects and antiques.Drop off contributions at 2324 Second Ave. till Dec. 1. Need pick up? Call 206-256-0809. Sale Dec. 5, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Sample wares: … [Read more...]

Critics in the Northwest appear to be vying for the punchline position from an old anti-feminist joke:Q: How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb? A: That's not funny.We fall all over ourselves in our haste to tell Portland's Jim Riswold that he's not funny. I've done it. Jen Graves has done it. Chas Bowie is doing it now, in response to Riswold's show at Augen Gallery. Me: He doesn't have the depth to compete with Mexican graveyard humor, even under the utterly false guise of a Hirst tribute. (Not just false but utterly false. … [Read more...]

Jonathan Horowitz:Dan Webb Joseph Park, picasso and bull, 2009, oil/panel, 36 x 24 inches Ree Brown … [Read more...]

Before he became director of Western Bridge, Eric Fredericksen was an art critic.To wit, his review of Whiting Tennis in 2000: WHITING TENNIS' new work is dumb. Dumb as in dumb luck, dumb as in mute, dumb as in the best solution to a problem is the simplest one. In these forms, dumb is good. And in art, this kind of dumb is rare. Art is rarely free of gamesplaying, of a strategically marked-out position that the artist can work from, of some role that defines readings and defends the value of the work. Tennis' position for this show is … [Read more...]

Via … [Read more...]

It's possible to be famous long past your lifetime on the strength of one piece. No one exemplifies that possibility as well as Meret Oppenheim, whose Object from 1936 is at the Museum of Modern Art.   Its origins, from MoMA:This Surrealist object was inspired by a conversation between Oppenheim and artists Pablo Picasso and Dora Maar at a Paris cafe. Admiring Oppenheim's fur-covered bracelet, Picasso remarked that one could cover anything with fur, to which she replied, "Even this cup and saucer." Soon after, when asked by André Breton, … [Read more...]

In the anything-goes, free-form era of contemporary criticism, only those whose tenure is guaranteed can dare to be dull. They write to keep a well-fed hand in. Others tap dance. They're as good as their clicks. Dull used to be the critical norm. Few long for a return to those days, but back then, attention came to critics who articulated a rigorous set of ideas, not necessarily a snappy approach to the sentence. Personally, I'm all about snappy. And instead of possessing concepts which I bring to bear on the art, I respond to the ideas in the … [Read more...]

Via … [Read more...]

David Barnes (Image via)Randy Hayes … [Read more...]

In 1978, Allan McCollum began a series of paintings (Surrogates) that were no more than extensions of the frame. Evan Blackwell's paintings are the frames.In his solo exhibit at Seattle's 4Culture Gallery, Lost in Space, Blackwell proves (among his many other material explorations) that Tara Donovan isn't the only artist coming up with new uses for drinking straws. Hers billow, like clouds. His are salvaged camouflage with a direct hit in the center. The center is your center, wherever you happen to be looking. It's the illusion of a ripple … [Read more...]

can sit on them. (Via) … [Read more...]

From Seattle's Wynne Greenwood:Hello! FEMINIST FORM, a new screening series, is starting next Saturday. Please come, it would be great to see you there! And tell your friends, family, colleagues, neighbors, lovers, teachers, partners... FEMINIST FORM presents video work by: Wynne Greenwood and K8 Hardy Saturday, November 21 Doors open at 7:30pm Screening begins at 8pm Hiawatha Artist Lofts Community Room 843 Hiawatha Pl. S Seattle $5 - $10 Sliding Scale Suggested Donation. Chair seating is limited, please come early if you want to sit in a … [Read more...]

In the west plaza of Seattle's Safeco Field is a 5-ton granite boulder that sculptor Peter Shelton found in the Cascade range. It's an object with the power to bring wilderness into the city. Shelton honored it with a shadow, a black bronze replica that offers mass without weight. Woven on its surface are horizontal waves that respond to the surface nuances of the rock and answer its chaos with order. Titled "rockshadow," the piece plays with the nature of inside and out, form and shadow, the real and fake, the found and created.Despite the … [Read more...]

In art, meth lab imagery tends to engage the DIY spirit of the outlaws. In an art context, before they are outlaws, they are makers. Claiming them is radical, but possibly no more radical than artists' interest (now fading) in Project Runway. From high fashion to low crimes, enterprises that require the skill of the hand attract artists, even those whose practice calls for them to delegate fabrication to others.As installations, meth labs fascinate, which can't be said of PR. The problem with the current season is not the move to LA, although … [Read more...]

Vija Celmins is known for her small output interrupted by long silences. To admire her work is to lose one's taste for charm. Her early still lifes are full of an understated yet powerful dread. Her later seascapes, desert floors and night skies look like the world seen through the eyes of the dead. From 1977 to 1982, she paired rocks she had picked up and saved with painted bronze replicas. Eleven pairs are at the Museum of Modern Art. I got the idea for this piece while walking in northern New Mexico picking up rocks, as people do. I'd bring … [Read more...]

Jen Graves on Jeffry Mitchell, a breathtaking  piece of writing, here.Jeffry Mitchell's art is ejaculatory, in every good and holy and dirty and wrong sense of the word. We are discussing this at church. Actually, we are outside church; we've just come from the pews of St. Ignatius at Seattle University, where we lifted our eyes up to the half-naked, tortured, and dead Christ, and kept quiet. Seattle could be entering its golden age of art criticism. There are more good writers covering visual art than ever before.A psychotic need to deny: … [Read more...]

The European Dark Ages do not haunt a hearty strain of the contemporary imagination for its wars, famines, dreads and superstitions, but for its irrational certainties. Good and evil were as concrete in the world as a horse in a pasture, a baby crying in a house or a woman drowned in a well. By casting its shadow on the brightest of days, evil affirmed its presence. The struggle against it was constant, and risks extended into eternity. What did that world look like?Claire Cowie's The Weeping and Gnashing of Teeth continues at Gage Academy … [Read more...]

is trapped in the past.Hannah Lamar Simmons, from the series, Have You Read The News Today. … [Read more...]

are an illusion to me now. David Dupuis - Lost on the Frontiers of Heaven and HellTracey Emin - Everyone I have ever slept with, 1963-1995 … [Read more...]

William Powhida's cartoon attacking the New Museum is terrific as a cartoon. As he points out in his blog, in case the audience is too dim to see the connection, it derives from the slashing wit of Ad Reinhardt, who terrorized reactionaries in the late 1940s.Cartoons are supposed to be unfair, one-sided and vehement. Powhida delivers on all counts. Less successful is the journalism that has risen like a surface to air missile to share in the attack. I'd like to propose the Dick Cheney rule for art writers. Is the subject under investigation … [Read more...]

Bill Finger spent 16 years working as a movie-set cameraman before packing it in to become an artist. He can run, but he cannot hide. In every way, the career that he ditched informs the one he moved into.He builds models that he photographs as full-scale environments. After Thomas Demand, Oliver Boberg, James Casebere and Ross Sawyers, it's a popular strategy, but Finger's are unlike anyone else's. They were born worn out and anonymous, as if endless actors had been interrogated inside his police station...stared out his window ...or glanced … [Read more...]

Cake:Oil: (Claude Zervas) … [Read more...]

Except for Ambach & Rice, which this year is part NADA, Seattle galleries will be largely absent this year in Miami. Each year since 2005, when Seattle artist Jaq Chartier and her husband, Dirk Park, rented a sweet little motel on Ocean Beach and invited 35 galleries to join them, Aqua Art Miami was a real contender among what were known as the hotel fairs, satellites to the main event, Art/Basel/Miami Beach. Not only was Aqua's lineup strong, the hotel itself was a draw: open, airy and full of light. Wandering through too many of the other … [Read more...]