Modern Art by Craig Damrauer, recently featured on Jen Bekman's 20x200 online art-buying site.

F*ck, I know I saw that somewhere ...

I spend more time than I like to think of fact-checking stuff online, mostly for blog posts and my radio spots.* My bad, I know - I should be using offline resources as well as online. But sometimes I'm prompted to think - who's fact-checking the fact-checkers?

Are our publishing houses and art galleries employing fact-checkers? How about the art mags? Goodness knows in the editorial work I've done it's never been made explicit to me that I need to relentlessly review every name, date, title, quote, anecdote and beyond. Certainly I've never had a piece of fact-checked writing handed back to me.

Last year in the New Yorker (sadly only the abstract is available online) John McPhee wrote an interesting account of what it's like to be a fact-checker at the magazine - a venerable role at a venerable institution. The piece started

Sara Lippincott retired as an editor at this magazine in the early nineteen-nineties, having worked in The New Yorker’s fact-checking department from 1966 until 1982. She had a passion for science. In 1973, a long piece of the writer’s called “The Curve of Binding Energy” received her full-time attention for three or four weeks and needed every minute of it. Explaining her work to an audience at a journalism school, Sara once said, “Each word in the piece that has even a shred of fact clinging to it is scrutinized, and, if passed, given the checker’s imprimatur, which consists of a tiny pencil tick.”

The pencils are obviously writ large in the fact-checker's mind: Virginia Heffernan's recent piece in the New York Times also begins with the pencils

The day I became a fact-checker at The New Yorker, I received one set of red pencils and one set of No. 2 pencils.

So I'm curious - who's got their pencils out in New Zealand?

* I was reminded this when I read two items on the same story this morning - the Guardian and the NYT on the recent discovery that the moon has shrunk (barely, and slowly - no need to freak out). The Brits said 200 metres and the Yanks 200 yards and while we're quibbling over less than 20 metres, this is science we're talking about - the discipline of exactitude, ferchrissakes.

Friday muster

1.

Australian auction house Deutscher and Hackett get offered a "contentious nude" by Bill Henson, decide to give it a miss - The Australian and Art Market Monitor suggest the decision is based more on a failing art market than the chance of a resurgence of this year's earlier outcry.

2.

As Cheryl Bernstein observes, Pundit's Keith Ovenden is no fan of Fiona Hall. I have no love of the heavy-breathing show myself, but found Ovenden's repeated use of "Ms" Hall condescending. I'm a bit of a bone-picker here - I also loathe it when people write of Rita and Frances, not Angus and Hodgkins - and think a simple surname will suffice. It's Ovenden's first review on Pundit, so time will tell - maybe the next will be of Mr Van Hout's two openings next week?

3.

LACMA are blogging, and in the most recent post, a curator goes that extra mile for the sake of her collection items.

4.

Finally - does your gallery or museum site have RSS feeds? If you do, think about adding them to Ideum's latest project, the RSS feed mixer.

Tics

All writers have tics. Me, I'm a qualifier - my texts are littered with kindas, sortas, maybes and almosts. In print copy I ruthlessly hunt them down and eliminate them; my online voice is probably closer to my spoken conversation.

The writers at Watch This Scape are very fond of 'nice', and variations upon a theme of 'crazy'.

John Hurrell's word of the year would appear to be 'muscular'

"Karaka II (1980) is unusually large for Walters, being particularly muscular in its organisation of pulsing korus, and with their bulbs being especially large."

"Of the nine works ... the black on white paintings are the best, partly because Sara Hughes had a coloured palette similar to Heaphy’s, so that ‘look’ is starting to look now like a Gow Langsford brand, and also because formally they are more muscular anyway."

"Braddock’s wiry anaemic freckled back presented this way has its own muscular eroticism."

"They are intimate works, not muscular but gorgeously delicate."

"Their works had nice muscular scale matched with intriguing ideas."

"Her placement of two panels side by side similarly creates peculiar tensions where the suggested patterns avoid a strident dynamic and remain anaemic, circumnavigating the muscular."

"They combine to look thick and muscular, as if drawn by say Richard Serra."

And from a review of Lisa Crowley's current show, which appeared in my feedreader this morning but has disappeared from the blog: "their muscular scale, all being 1234 mm high and between 1386 and 1946 mm wide".

I recently finished reading Don Thompson's The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Art and Auction Houses.

Like the art widow book, it had me alternatively engrossed (especially the bit about art institutions deaccessioning via sealed bid auctions) and squeaking with frustration (maybe - just maybe - some of these artists are actually amazing, not just mega-well-branded).

I almost quit at the introductory chapter though, when Thompson ruled out writing about photography because he's not that sure it's art. He doesn't really get it, he says, so he'll stick to paintings and sculpture.

I can't quite believe that people who obviously care about and are interested in art still stick at photography. So I'm throwing the question open here:

poll by twiigs.com

Happy golden days of yore

Is it really still okay to call people "spinsters"?

That's the unmarried women spinster, not the media type.

Art: What motivates big collectors to do what they do? - Edward Sozanski

Cry me a river

I've never cried in an art gallery. Books regularly end with me in a snuffly heap - from a book about a grizzly bear going to his death when I was about 7, through to Hilary's Mantel's French Revolution epic which had me bawling into my pillow on Monday night - but nary a tear before a work of art.

Maybe James Elkin can help me. I've just found out that his 2001 book Pictures and Tears : A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings is (almost entirely, as far as I can make it out) reproduced on Google Books.

Eight words to describe an artist

OVERUSED

1. Emerging

2. Established

3. Significant

4. Important

5. Major

6. Leading

7. Acclaimed

8. Preeminent

UNDERUSED

1. Ace

2. Hilarious

3. Deep

4. Well-endowed

5. Noxious

6. Zaftig

7. Punchy

8. Sanguine

Five art words that I've been glad to see the back of

1. Palimpsest

2. Discursive

3. Self-reflexive

4. Rhizomatic

5. Any word with its first syllable wrapped in parentheses: (con)textual, (re)present, (re)produce ....

UPDATE: A reader suggests

6. Slippage

thanks J.

Trash talking on Artbash

Yeah, I'll admit it. I lurk on Artbash. Sometimes I laugh at Artbash. But I never contribute.

Over the last few weeks, there's been a rash of reviews, apparently by students enrolled in a contextual studies course at a tertiary institution (going by the Wellington skew, I'd guess Massey).

There's been grumbling from Artbash regulars over the quality of the writing and thinking in these reviews - and fair cop to, in some cases. A review of Richard Serra's Tilted Arc, describing it as a ineffectual public sculpture about the Vietnam War, drew particular ire. (One site regular plausibly suggests that the writer was actually reviewing Maya Lin's Vietnam memorial, and got a bit confused).

In response to the criticism, one of the students posted this comment:

You wanna know the hilarious things Alibi... you're right, we are here completing projects that we have to do for our contextual studies -- and yes, some of our writing might be garbage as you and John have pointed out in some other comments.(we're obviously not as intelligent as you appear to be!)

None of us want to post on here because the environment is completely negative and does not inspire me to want to engage with any of you and learn anything from you at all. While I agree with what it says on this page about criticism being good (and therefore encouraged)-- there's a difference, I think the criticism we're looking for is 'constructive'.

So, don't worry, we are all meeting with our 'teacher' to get our 'homework' marked today, so you can be glad that many of us will probably disappear and you can have your elitist website back.

To which John Hurrell replied:

The site is hardly 'elitist', Jabby, and hardly 'negative' when regulars mutter about the site being bombarded by contributors who lack the conviction to stand their ground and argue their point of view.

If you write when you don't want to and say things you don't mean, what use is that? The result is clutter with no substance.

The review and its comment thread have now been moved to the trash section of the site. Which is one way of arguing your point of view.

An oldie but a goodie

I wanted to share this complete evisceration of a vapid piece of art writing by the redoubtable Tyler Green, which I stumbled across this morning. From 2004, but more than worth it.

Stupidity examined - but whose? - Tyler Green

And yet ....

"Ultimately flawed, yet ultimately perfect"

Sarah Jane Parton @ The Physics Room

"We are free to play as we wish, yet at the same time we are always mediated by the boundaries"

Toshi Endo @ The Michael Hirschfeld Gallery, City Gallery Wellington

"Ironic, yet earnest"

Fiona Gillmore @ The Michael Hirschfeld Gallery, City Gallery Wellington

"The world in miniature, as depicted by Marie Shannon, is just like—and yet nothing like—real life as we know it."

Marie Shannon @ City Gallery Wellington