John Rockwell writes today in the New York Times Arts section:

"A lot of art, especially of the past, has set out to be beautiful; a lot of art, especially of the present, has set out to be ugly... And yet there has been a kind of semi-guilty underground cult of beauty that has persisted through our ugly times.

...Art moves in cycles, reacting against what came just before. Maybe some of us have grown weary of being hectored by films, by flashy images and loud music and conventional stories, however well told, that dictate what we should be feeling. At least some of us, at least occasionally, downright crave an antidote in the form of pure beauty."

I think that the Arts Editor of the NYT may be a closet mossback!

Thanks AJ!

Our "public art" pandas are getting vandalized, one has even been stolen, but as Tracy Lee points out, in Sweden (where they have cows instead of pandas as public art), some local Stockholm artists have taken matters into their own hands and kidnapped one and are staging a protest.

There are 68 more fiber-glass cows grazing on pavements, squares and in shop-windows all around Stockholm.

The cows are part of Cowparade and the concept and cows are apparently traveling all over the world. Website here.

Thanks to the several readers who emailed me with a definition of "mossback."

1. An old shellfish or turtle with a growth of algae on its back.
2. An old, large, or sluggish fish.
3. An extremely conservative or old-fashioned person.

So, I'm definately a mossback!

Glenn Dixon is back to his old self (I think) and is a bit more opinionated and sarcastic in these mini reviews in today's Post, although he mixes it up with a couple of plain, "descriptive" reviews as well. Dixon is at his best when he expresses an opinion and thus reveals his art personality in his writing.

J.T. Kirkland also has a few words on Dixon over at Thinking About Art.

I would like someone to email me and explain what Dixon means by a "mossback" when he writes:

"Like any summertime grab bag, Conner Contemporary's survey of work by local art grads is hit-or-miss. The scruffy portraiture of J. Jordan Bruns and the fluorescent-lit interiors of Matt Klos will gratify only mossbacks who feared the academy had stopped teaching academic painting. But video artist Annie Schap steals the show. In "Say It With Feeling," she stabs a can of Miller and effortfully sucks the beer out of the side of the can, capping her performance with a burped "I love you" that blurs the line between emotional and physical stress. "Love Hurts Hands," in which Nazareth's deathless power ballad is spelled out line by line across the artist's knuckles, biker-tattoo-style, is the best music video I've seen in five years. It analyzes the cynical, seductive language of pop in a way that only reinforces its hold on the imagination."

He's obviously disliking Bruns and Klos' works because they're well-done, representational work (and thus academic)... and that's his right as a critic and person to join the tired tradition of contemporary critics disliking representational paintings (or painting period), but he lost me with the adjective "mossback" to describe people who like a well executed painting.

Perhaps it is a quaint, local term? Or is the word's meaning the antonym of a "rolling stone gathers no moss" saying?

I think that I am a mossback, so I'd like to know what it means...

DCist is a new online resource about DC, and they have a good posting about the Blake Gopnik idea first discussed here last Sunday.

More about DCist here.

Other good comments from Erik's Rants here and also from Greg.org here.

Today is the Third Thursday of the month, and thus the downtown galleries have their extended hours.

The exhibition at Flashpoint sounds specially interesting. It's called "Sensory Overload" and it is a Multi-media Performance and Preview of the DC Sonic Circuits Festival. It is a fundraiser for Flashpoint, and it starts at 8 PM and there's a $10 donation.

The night will feature live dance performances, painting, performance art and laptop-based sound processing. Performers include Marni Leikin - Visual/performance art, Jane Pingleton Evans (Visual/performance art), Amber King (Visual art), Jane Jerardi (Choreography/dance), Scott Allison (Laptop sound and video art), Doug Wolf (Laptop sound and video art), Derek Morton (Laptop sound and video art) and Rebecca Mills (Laptop sound and video art).

And then, tomorrow is the third Friday of August and the Canal Square Galleries will have their new openings, from 6-9 PM.

See ya there!

Spent around 17 hours in line yesterday with my daughter Elise, who is visiting from Gig Harbor, Washington. She tried out for American Idol. I had intended to drop her off at the Convention Center, but as she's only 17 I had to stay with her all day.

Thus the lack of any postings yesterday.