Blake Gopnik gives us a look at the Havana Bienal today in the Sunday Arts section of the Post.

By the way, I know it's pedantic, but if we call the Venice Biennial the Biennale then we should refer to the Havana Biennial as the Bienal, which is the Spanish word for Biennial, just as Biennale is the Italian word for it.

Although he mentioned it at the beginning, he skimmed lightly over the very important issue of censorship and this was very disappointing to me. More on this issue here and from the Prince Claus Fund, the main financial supporter of the past Bienal. They withdrew support from this Bienal because of Castro's recent human rights abuses and artist censorship.

More on the desperate situation of human rights in Cuba from Human Rights Watch and from Amnesty International.

Otherwise the article was very readable and somewhat predictable, as Blake does not mention a single painter and shows his colors by writing: "A visit to the main art school showed student work as good as you'd get anywhere, even in relatively newfangled fields such as performance and video art."

Newfangled? Hardly. As a child, I recall being dragged to "enjoy" performance art in the 60's in New York by various artsy members of my family, so that's been around for 40 years or more and video art came out as soon as the first video camera came out in the 70s and by the time I went to art school at the University of Washington (1977-1981) in Seattle, my then girlfriend Susie K. was boring us to sleep with her video art, which consisted of her recording the Seattle skyline from the Space Needle Restaurant as it slowly rotated around the Needle.

Same crap that Tacita Dean did decades later at the revolving restaurant atop the TV tower at Alexanderplatz in Berlin. Susie K did it in 1979.

Also today, Paul Richards reviews Philip Guston's retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Guston is one of those artists that are very difficult to digest, but the more you talk to people, especially young artists, about him, the more influential he seems.

"If someone bursts out laughing in front of my painting," Richards says Guston wrote in 1973, "that is exactly what I want."

The retrospective, curated by Michael Auping, was organized by the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and will travel to the Royal Academy of Arts, London, after closing in New York.