Adventures in Blogdom: "Looting Matters" Takes the Bus; "Art Tribune" Editor Muzzled; the "Exhibitionist" Bares His Knuckles UPDATED

Those who think I've been too blatantly self-promoting should get a load of what my British blogging buddy, David Gill, has just done to call attention to Looting Matters, my go-to source for cultural-property news.

Do you think I could plaster some CultureGrrl banners on NYC vehicles, as David has done in London?


"Stop messing about"?!?

I guess my NYC equivalent would have to be: "Cultcha Without CultureGrrl? Fuhgeddaboudit!" Gill says this bus fuss "has generated a huge amount of interest." Hey, I'll try anything!

On a more serious note, my French blogging buddy Didier Rykner of The Art Tribune found himself bounced off a public television program, where he had been scheduled to fulminate against the controversial Louvre Abu Dhabi.

Rykner reports:

There is no more need to wonder at the strange turn of events! An item published on 11 March in the satirical weekly, Le Canard Enchainé, tells us that the Louvre had clearly warned the channel: if I were interviewed, the president of the Louvre, Henri Loyrette, would not in turn grant an interview for the program. Obviously, Arte [the television station] cannot afford to be on bad terms with the Louvre. (They have production agreements together.)

So, on 18 April, viewers will see a documentary on French television which presents only a consensus, explaining just how fantastic the Louvre-Abou Dhabi is, as proven by the fact that it only raises positive reactions and praise!

Closer to home, Boston blogger Geoff Edgers is engaged in a more urgent form of self-promotion. ("Self-preservation" is more like it.)

Reacting to the shocking news that the financially pressed NY Times Co. might imminently shut down the Boston Globe, which it owns, Edgers rallied the arts troops. He got three major museum directors and the managing director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra to testify to the paper's importance in the city's cultural and civic life.

I do want Geoff to succeed in reuniting the Kinks, but I don't want him spending full-time on that project! It's unthinkable that Boston's premier newspaper could die at the hands of New York's premier paper. Having just heard the NY Times' cultural news editor, Sam Sifton, exult that his paper's financial troubles had not caused any decrease in the space allotted to the arts, and having read Times assistant managing editor Richard Berke's recent boast that the paper possessed sufficient resources to bankroll art critic Michael Kimmelman's farflung peregrinations, I find the Globe's global plight even harder to comprehend.

Is Edgers destined to join ArtsJournal's other mainstream-media expatriates? For his sake (and Boston's), I hope he keeps his current gig.

As for CultureGrrl's gig: With donations again stalled, we're imminently arriving at the end of this blog as a daily. Starting in May, it'll be weekly. (Okay, maybe twice a week.)

UPDATE: Oops! Gill's just joking (and I'm just gullible)!