Of all the moronic, dimwit, tunnel-visioned, agenda-driven, academic, peer-pressured reasons to clamor and claim (for 40 years now) that "painting is dead," this is probably the only good reason to kill painting.

Warning: The link above is rather gross, as it depicts artist Keith Boadwee in the process of "painting" via the use of his asshole. This is definately "mixed media."

And this artist may be a close second.

The Washington Times art critic, Joanna Shaw-Eagle offers her view of the Washington Convention Center's Public Art Collection.

Why the Washington Times doesn't have a "regular" weekly "Galleries" column, like most major metropolitan newspapers in the world offer, has always been a mystery to me.

Another great mystery: Considering how inexpensive storage is, and how easy it is to store an article online once it has been created. Why doesn't the Washington City Paper archive its articles?

The Corcoran tells me that Salvadorean artist Muriel Hasbun, who lives in DC and is a longtime Corcoran faculty member, and who represented El Salvador at the last Venice Biennale, and is represented locally by Conner Contemporary will be having a solo show at the Corcoran opening on March 6, 2004 and curated by Paul Roth, the Corcoran's Associate Curator of Photography and Media Arts. An excellent essay about Hasbun's work by Andy Grunberg can be read online here.

Opportunity for artists:

These are "open" mail art exhibitions (as opposed to "juried"). This means that all submissions will be included in the exhibition. Entries are sent via mail and are usually not returned. Mail art is usually created on a blank postcard and sent through the mail to the exhibition.

Deadline: Dec. 31, 2003
Group 78, Tokyo's English-language local group of Amnesty International, the worldwide human rights organization, will adopt the theme "Violence Against Women" as a major campaign priority next year. To publicize this and to reach out to women's groups, human rights groups and other concerned people, they are appealing to the mail art artists for suitable submissions on the theme. They intend to exhibit in Tokyo and possibly other cities in Japan, and to produce a documentation of the submitted works. Every contributor will receive a copy of the documentation.

MEDIA/TECHNIQUE: free
SIZE: from postcard size to A4 size (29 X 21 cm) 2D only.
DEADLINE: Dec. 31, 2003

Send to:

Chris Pitts
Kyoritsu Women's College
3-27 Kanda-Jinbocho
Chiyoda^ku
101-0051 Tokyo
Japan

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Deadline: February 1, 2004
"Bras for Breast Cancer." Embellish a bra for an exhibit to be held at Northwood University in Cedar Hill, Texas in April of 2004. Bras will be exhibited along with paintings, poetry, videos, installations and assemblages created by women and men who have stories to share about themselves and or loved ones who are coping with Breast Cancer. All entries will be exhibited. No Jury. No Returns.

Send all entries to:
Junanne Peck
P.O.Box 177528
Irving, Texas
75017-7528
Email questions to junannepeck@mac.com

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Deadline: February 1, 2004
The Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art is requesting mail art submissions for an exhibit in February 2004 on the theme "Sense of Place." Artists are encouraged to respond by providing works that examine changing conceptions of place, borders and nationalism on a global scale. How would you represent your sense of place in today's world? What has happened to your sense of place since the rise of globalization? Since 9/11? How has the spread of internet communications altered perspectives on near and far?

Each work should not exceed 20 inches in any direction and may be 3 dimensional. Please include contact information: name, address, email. Due to space limitations, not all submissions can be exhibited. However, all submissions will appear on BMoCA's website and all submitting artists will be acknowledged. Exhibited works will be listed in the catalogue and on the BMoCA website. Submissions will not be returned unless SASE is included. Questions to Brandi Mathis at 303/443-2122.

Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art
1750 13th St.
Boulder, CO 80302

British art critic Matthew Collins, who is often credited with helping to launch many YBA's, and modern video and installation art now says:

"We don't live in a great time for art; we live in a time when art is very successful as a leisure activity. Art is very amusing, but within that culture there's still a hierarchy of better and worse. I'm interested in that hierarchy but I recognise that modern art and pre-modern art were very important, and postmodern art is rubbish, really."

Collins has a new TV series on British television that begins next Sunday. Read the whole story in The Observer here.

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.

Terry Teachout, who BLOGs about the Arts for ArtsJournal.com has a very interesting posting about Jennifer Howard, a contributing editor of Washington Post Book World, and an article that she wrote, compalining about the direction that she feels the BLOGosphere is heading.