My 2010 guest-post from another blog, on painter/sculptor Anne Truitt, offers an example of blogosphere-era blogging before "social" ended long-form discussion. Based on that example, perhaps it needed to die. My commentary was meant as a flippant dig at a big-shot gallery's attempt to gild the back-catalog lily, but then I got sandbagged by the lily's biggest fan. Things immediately went wrong when the blogger I was filling in for undermined the post on twitter by calling it non-committal; this goaded me to commit, in a short update. "Work of minor historical relevance" I still agree with but "mediocre" is perhaps too strong. Then Truitt Fan arrived with sandbags in the form of long, long comments amounting to "I disagree." These could have been overlooked but I used them to elaborate on the reasons for the flippant dig (a brief history of Minimalist art and where Truitt fit in the timeline). Finally by the end of the thread I marshalled some critical support in the form of James Meyer's minimalism book. The effect of all this is exhaustion. Perhaps what amounts to water-cooler chatter has some value but for criticism to have real bite, it should probably have institutional sponsorship, with no talkback feature. In the '00s blogging seemed a relief from precisely that but in retrospect, it looks like a gateway to the yammering back and forth of Twitter, et al.