Because I've been lax...

While I've been busy with Tut, Clyfford Still, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, the rest of the art world is focused on Venice and Basel, which aren't so different. (I've been trumpeting that line for two years now, so it's kind of nice to see some other folks agree.)

The Telegraph (UK) is the latest to agree on fairs and biennials. Still, this line from Colin Gleadell's story reveals a remarkable amount of cluelessness about how the art world works:

The fair is considered the most important of its kind because its organisers rigorously select the dealers who can supply the best quality from early 20th-century classics to the latest art fashions.

Right, and art gallery world politics have nothing to do with it.

In Slate, Marc Spiegler writes about the Venice Biennale art fair. At Louise T.'s Artinfo.com, Sarah Douglas and unnamed contributors blogged days one, two, and three from Basel, but LTB ran it in an old-media format: a notebook. (Blog it people, blog it.) At least it was dishy and entertaining. Oh, and Artinfo also noticed that Venice is an art fair and that Basel is an uniennial.

Artnet's Walter Robinson engagingly mixed scene reports with some critical writing in his first Venice dispatch, and tackled some broader ideas with a chattily entertaining top ten list. 

So it's official: Art criticism and art writing is now mostly writing about the market. Why? That's what fascinates art world folks and with only a couple exceptions it's American art pubs who sent people to Venice.

What else do you expect when America's major regional papers don't send their art critics to Europe? I haven't read anything on Venice with a Boston Globe, Philly Inky, Chicago Tribune, Dallas Morning News, Miami Herald, Houston Chronicle, or San Francisco Chronicle byline, just to name a few.

Meanwhile, NYTer Michael Kimmelman and LATer Christopher Knight (he has strippers!) and even WPer Blake Gopnik took the more traditional approach, finding actual art and ideas between the parties and dealmaking that preoccupied everyone else. Strange isn't it -- to the general-interest pubs it's about the art, but to the art world pubs it's about everything else.