I JUST LOVE THE HOUSES IN THE SOUTH, THE WAY THEY BUILT THEM. THAT NEGRITUDE ARCHITECTURE. I REALLY LOVE TO WATCH THE WAY BLACK PEOPLE MAKE THINGS, HOUSES OR MAGAZINE STANDS IN HARLEM, FOR INSTANCE. JUST THE WAY WE USE CARPENTRY. NOTHING FITS, BUT EVERYTHING WORKS. THE DOOR CLOSES, IT KEEPS THINGS FROM COMING THROUGH. BUT IT DOESN'T HAVE THAT NEATNESS ABOUT IT, THE WAY WHITE PEOPLE PUT THINGS TOGETHER; EVERYTHING IS A THIRTY-SECOND OF AN INCH OFF. (more)

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 crackers, including Maurizio Cattelan, Chuck Close, Andreas Gursky, Jeff Koons and - of course - a big naked guy from Ron Mueck (on loan from the Hirshhorn). In an icing-on-the-PR-cake move, the catalogue features an essay by (in)famous author James Frey.

When Jasper Johns and others had found the abstract in the ordinary, Truitt seems to find the everyday in the abstract -- a much stranger thing to do.

The Hirshhorn retrospective should vault her into a special pantheon of her own, one which she occupied in privacy during her own life and in public now that her work belongs to the world.

Remember: American men don't do art unless it involves naked ladies, unless the men have thin shoulders. I hate you, Garrison Keillor.

"I'm not anti-Kinkade," Turner said. "I think he gets under everyone's skin because he glorifies the fairy tale. Kinkade is a master marketer, and I think the idealizing of the images is Kinkade's own inside joke."

The numbers kept coming up in the daily reports. Five here, fourteen there, one day after another. And then the growing figure mounting over a thousand. Peripherally it was ever-present, but still only an abstraction. It was no longer enough to know how many. I needed to see pictures of them, to familiarize myself just a tiny bit more with what was happening far from my warm home. And it really isn't much. It too is a mere summary, just one more step beyond bare numbers.

Yet for me it is something. It means spending time with each one. It is looking into their eyes to see who is now gone. It is following the line of their brow and trying to perceive the expression there. It is a visual and visceral exploration of these individuals by way of their faces. It is my own eyes and my hand tracing out some very slight acquaintance with what's occurring.

"The work I have made so far about veterans has been kind of 'out there.' I want this one to be more about 'in here,' '' he says, tapping his head.(more)

But this is not just a promotional treasure-house show. Installed chronologically by chief curator Paul Schimmel, it also tells a story -- although one that's rarely heard. The postwar rise of American art is paired with the simultaneous rise of Los Angeles, from shallow backwater to cultural powerhouse. (more)

Interesting that Morgan's work shares so much with SF's Squeak Carnwath. Mannered is a good word for her work as well, but Baker has come to appreciate her enough to overlook it:

Things make their way into Carnwath's paintings as they do into anyone's consciousness: by intrusion, by triggering memories and ricocheting off the mental walls of habit and fixation. (more)

Also from Baker, bad news for the Berkeley Art Museum:

A shortage of funds has prompted UC Berkeley to abandon its plan to construct a new Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive downtown. The building, a distinctive and innovative design by Tokyo architect Toyo Ito estimated to cost $143 million, was to replace the museum's present, seismically endangered quarters on Bancroft Way, completed in 1970. (more)

Baker and Knight are stellar, but also solid is Robert Pincus at the San Diego Union-Tribune. His recent piece on Tara Donovan says it all.

Sample:

The question -- How did she do it? -- has different facets to it. There's the technical aspects of how to get thousands of pins to form a cube without adhesives (density and gravity are what does the remarkable trick) and how thousands of straws stay in place when stacked (some adhesive here).

But there is also the bigger issue: How are these works so much greater than the sum of their parts? The best word for it might be alchemy. A wall of straws, "Haze," doesn't look like straws -- it resembles a meteorological event, shifting clouds or fog. Scotch tape becomes a field of delicate forms, looking like a bed of underwater flora. (more)

Q: How many feminists does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: That's not funny.

He doesn't have the depth to compete with Mexican graveyard humor, even under the utterly false guise of a Hirst tribute.

Riswold makes big, glossy, colorful photographs that reach for satire but amount to little more than low-calorie artistic cannibalism. (more)

It doesn't take a degree in art history to get Riswold's one-liners. One of the show's better photographs, for instance, a small still life titled "Damien Hirst Gets a Fish for His Seventh Birthday," alludes to Hirst's infamous sculpture of a dead shark by imaging the artist's boyhood fish tank, occupied by a singular fish skeleton. Seeing as Hirst first exhibited his 14-foot tiger shark in 1992, Riswold's commentary is as culturally relevant as a Monica Lewinsky joke. (more)

Q: How many art critics does it take to change a light bulb?
A: That's not funny.

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 dumbness. In his cogent, helpful artist's statement (these two adjectives apply to almost no other artist's statement) he writes that he's "the kind of person who's struck dumb by a child's painting or a little canvas-board winter landscape with birds, and thought it odd that after 15 years or more of 'painting' I'd never sat down and tried to make a 'picture.' So I did, literally sit down and try."(more)

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, Surrealism's leader, to participate in the first Surrealist exhibition dedicated to objects, Oppenheim bought a teacup, saucer, and spoon at a department store and covered them with the fur of a Chinese gazelle. (more)