Day: August 16, 2008

We're discussing the mural Jackson Pollock did for Peggy Guggenheim's home at Paddy Johnson's. An anonymous commenter from Iowa (where the painting now resides) is trash-talking certain aspects of its legend based on opinions of nameless experts. All very interesting but we're waiting for some actual evidence.

Twitter notes on recent trip to Whitney Museum:

buckminster fuller show: tensegrity heaven, wall of buckyballs

the new, rigorous paul mccarthy: no fluids, no orgies, "critique of architecture"--weird museum-enabled self-revisionism

fritz glarner, burgoyne diller, leon polk smith, ellsworth kelly, mary heilman - whitney humor except it's not supposed to be funny

Holland Cotter on Peter Saul (Times sign-in prob. required). One of Cotter's theses is that Saul is the Real Deal while Carroll Dunham and Elizabeth Murray got careers (to put it more bluntly than Cotter does). Check out the slide show: scrumptiously painted early work gives way to psychedelic boils and sores. Compare CO Itchee Bitchee, 1964, with Bush at Abu Ghraib, 2006, for examples of success and failure of politically-themed art.