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Last week, Tyler Green challenged Roberta Smith's definition of public art, here. She wanted to exclude land art and include Jeff Koons sculptures on the rooftop at the Met.

Of course land art is public art. Isn't it? Granted, a lot of it is hard for various publics to find, especially if, like Erin Hogan, they count on personal charm instead of a compass. (Story here.)

In the 1970s, Lawrence Alloway said that public art was a "focal point for an undifferentiated audience."

Visitors to the Met don't qualify. They hoof it up those famous steps and pay an admission fee. On the other hand, that fee is nothing compared to the cost of finding land art. Seekers could die out there and be another accident statistic. Plus, they aren't undifferentiated. Only in New Yorker cartoons do people wander aimlessly through a desert.

Following Alloway's lead, let's move the Met and land art off the table for a moment to consider the case of a piece of public art in an urban sculpture park.

The park is free admission. Come one, come all. Passersby don't have to go out of their way to see it. If they're on the north end of Seattle's downtown waterfront, they can't miss it.

The art is public art by anyone's measure, but I wonder if an exception needs to be made for Mark Dion's "Neukom Vivarium." It's a 60-foot Western hemlock nurse log encased in its own green glass hospital room. To cheer up the patient, the room is festooned with hand-painted tiles of native plants and insects.

Mark Dion, "Neukom Vivarium," photo Paul Joseph Brown, PI

Isn't it more of an educational opportunity than art, perfect for a science center maybe? I lean in that direction but might in time change my mind. If I saw it, that is. But even though I'm frequently in the park, I'm rarely there when "Vivarium" is open. The park is open dawn to dusk, but "Vivarium" stays closed until a trained volunteer is ready and able to lead a tour. Hours aren't posted. It's catch as catch can.

All volunteers wear orange vests. Their tours appear to be mandatory. The vests and volunteers are part of the art, and part of what I have against the art.

Dion discusses his reasoning here. Note his orange vest.

Says Nicole Griffin, SAM's associate PR manager: "It needs to live in an old growth rain forest ecosystem, maintained in a city through complex machinery, with humidity and temperature controls, and rain water misters."

Nature on life supports.

I agree with Smith that land art is a trek. To be public art as we have come to understand it, the public must have a chance to come across it unawares, to stop in its collective tracks and say, "What have we here?"

I want to approach Dion's piece fresh, but his volunteers won't let me, and when they're not there, neither is anybody else.

More about the sculpture park here.

An art critic I know tells me whenever we run into each other that I'm writing well lately. Years go by. Always it's lately. Only lately am I writing well.

The reverse would be worse, which is why, when I run into Charles Mudede, I never tell him that he used to write well, even though that's what I'm thinking.

Mudede began big, with his "Police Beat" column in the Stranger, a bright idea from Emily White, who was editor at the time.

He looked through the police blotter and speculated on its contents. Because he is sky and the blotter earth, they found harmony together, like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire. As Pauline Kael memorably observed about the dancing duo, "He gave her class, and she gave him sex."

Only when dancing with her is he anything close to a sexy guy. Only when considering crime could Mudede be counted on for clarity.

With the help of director Robinson Devor, Mudede turned his column into a movie and moved on.

There's another subject on which Mudede shines. It's movies. His TestPattern essay on "2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY" enlarged its scope and made it matter. I realized, reading it, that I had no idea what the movie was about before that moment. For me it was just moments, Hal drifting away on an old song and the scrape of silverware against a plate in the lonely future.

Mudede: In 2001, humans are just one of several possible mediums (or beings) for the development of mind. In Hegel's philosophy, for example, the development of mind is limited to humans-two types of humans to be exact: Asians and Europeans. Consciousness starts in the mind of the Asians (that includes both Chinese and Mesopotamian civilizations) and moves to the mind of the Europeans (from the Greeks to the Germans-the race that ends the story of mind, according to Hegel). For Stanley Kubrick's movie, the story of consciousness moves from African apes, to American humans, and ends in a manmade computer. Also, consciousness is not limited to earth. It's on a journey away from the Earth to where it supposedly came from: deep space.

"2001: An Odyssey of Consciousness," here.

"An Adult Conversation" is from Jeremy Eaton's upcoming studio show/sale, "That Girl Eats Too Much."

Says Eaton: "An Adult Conversation" portrays the inebriated tumult of limb and leer that is the inevitable outcome of a meeting between two iconic cartoon archetypes of yesteryear, Betty Boop and Andy Capp, the floozy and the barfly of the comics page.

Focusing on the thinly-veiled carnality of each character, I've attempted to assemble the Freudian aspects of their trademark anatomies, in such a fashion as to playfully hint at these adult considerations, which have, over the years, been denuded and all but erased from their respective mythologies.

I love the blue eye in the upper right, quite Guston-like.

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Rich Silverstein., "Slogans of the Bush Years," via Huffington Post

At $20 each or $60 for three, the Huffington Post is selling a typographical exploration of the Bush years, its slogans, prime movers and accomplishments. The idea is to sell a lot of prints to pay for three giant murals to be pasted across a building expanse in New York, Los Angeles and Washington D.C.

Silverstein's blocky black/whites can't miss. They come from Christopher Wool, most famously his "SELL THE HOUSE. SELL THE CAR. SELL THE KIDS," from "Apocalypse Now."

The Huffington Post lithographs are swell, but even as billboards they won't have the impact Corianton Hale's multi-colored message of hope had in 2004, after Bush secured a second term. (PI story on the Stranger cover here.)

It rallied people who needed rallying. Paula Scher created the look in "All The News That Fits," 2001-2003.

Everybody involved in the design of dissent owes the Constructivists. Their political optimism was misplaced, but their arrangements of typeface and imagery go on forever.

Yesterday, the Frye Art Museum cut its education department by one. Yoko Ott, manager of youth and community outreach programs, will leave, and her studio programs for teens will go with her.

(List of the classes Ott designed after the jump.)

"Friday at the Frye," an occasional program of arts actvities, is also gone but was never really there, taking place only twice last year.

The Frye supports itself through warehouse rental properties, and the market is sluggish. If all the properties were sold now, said Frye director Midge Bowman, they might collectively realize $26 million. The Frye's annual budget is $4 million.

Time to fund raise, which the Frye has never done. There might be future staff cuts, although none are anticipated this year.

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Sean M. Johnson must have listened to a lot of children's verses as a child. He's interested in London's bridges falling down, but he gives them the illusion of a second chance to be functional.

Each of his sculptures and photos at Howard House is a story complete without the telling. The risks he takes are associated with dance and so are his payoffs, those complete moments on the edge of a fall.

Johnson, "Family Portrait," tape and couch, image via Howard House

"Family Portrait" is a new form of grunge, an old gold couch taped halfway up a wall. Nothing but the tape holds it there. The couch attests to physical sprawl and mental inertia, but it has acquired art gravity through the Surrealist implications of its placement.

Johnson, "Drinks," photo, image via Howard House

There are other artists who reassemble furniture to frame it in a new context, including Roy McMakin , Lawrence Weiner and Drew Daly. Compared to their work, Johnson's is rough and tumble, Caliban to their Ariel.

"Love Seat" is a pair of overstuffed red chairs cut in half and joined. Because each lacks one leg, each needs the other. Johnson's version of coupled life requires each person to create an inadequate version of self to serve the unhealthy whole.

Johnson, "Grandpa," image via Howard House

If "Grandpa" could sing, it would be "Rock-a-bye, Baby." He's going down, but at this moment in his story, cigarettes and alcohol keep him aloft.

Johnson, "Thank You," image via Howard House

In the rear is "Thank You." The helium will leak away, but in the meantime, in the immortal words of Lawrence Welk, life is wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.

A roll of film that slid out of the pocket of a thief ransacking a car became the property of the victim. Those who posed for the pictures never saw them. If they stop by Howard House, however, they'll see themselves transformed. They are the subjects of a new series of Mark Takamichi Miller's paintings, titled, "Thieves."

Like Kerry James Marshall's "Lost Boys" from the early 1990s, Miller's figures derive from the ancient tradition of elegiac portraiture. But while Marshall's figures wear halos as retrospective tributes, Miller's are alive in the chaos of their time and place. They are stains within the larger stains of their collective lives.

While Marshall's oil paintings are small and succinct, Miller's are large and unraveled. They push against the contradictions of their creation, these unlikely combinations of acrylic gel, wax, urethane, oil, color markers and glass spheres.

In the 1990s, Miller confined himself to high-impact, oil paint abstraction, bulbous forms in fluid and creamy conjunction. When he moved to the figure, he didn't want to turn his silky charms loose on it. Instead, he treated the bodies of his subjects as a pause points in which paint pooled.

Wrinkled like crocodiles, these early figures are bas-relief sculptures made almost entirely of paint, created on glass and scraped off when thick enough with dental floss. In his latest series, he combines the grace of his abstractions with the blunt force of his bodies.

Miller is not entirely comfortable with what he knows how to do and likes to keep his skill in check. If he chose, he could deliver a credible version of Bay Area Figurative enlivened with a touch of Gerhard Richter. Instead, he employs conceptual restraints to focus his subject matter and different material approaches to each series.

All his figures are anonymous, dervived from packets of film left at the processer or taken from discarded family albums, but the characters in "Thieves" are doubly lost. They are clues to a crime and evidence of their own on-edge style.

"Man at a Party" lives in a fallout zone. His white shirt is a furious kind of weather, and his youth gives him a golden glow that sours across the blank expanse of his features.

In "Two Men at a Party," at least there's camaraderie. The duo occupy the bottom right-handed corner of an unprimed canvas. They are fevered to the point of transparency but thick, like smoke rings from cancerous lungs. A pit-bull has its own painting. As it looks up at the camera, its white eyes are unguarded and its body is a grizzled scribble. Miller painted it as a shadow mist with a killer instinct.

"And down in lovely muck I've lain, happy till I rose again," wrote A.E. Housman. Miller's muck is also lovely, fully realized yet casual, true to its snapshot origins as it enlarges upon their meaning.

One Pot at Bumbershoot was three nights of dinner as performance, with guests gathered around a thick slice of a downed tree to eat soup and share their impressions of the idealism, music, manners, violence, high hopes and grim realities associated with 1968.

On Sunday night Rebecca Brown sang. She didn't get a Stranger Genius Award for her voice. The song was a fragile vessel too, but as a child in a small Texas town in 1968, she saw it as promise of a wider world and rode it to where she is now, powerful and beloved.

Real musicians played and real dancers fell over, rising again in 1968-style, battered but unbowed. Conversation became circular, like clothes tumbling in a dryer. Few present were alive back then and almost none old enough to participate.

Activists from that era will take what we can get. Mostly for good reasons, few want to hear from us.

In San Francisco last year with friends who'd never been to City Light Books, I asked the cab driver to take us to Carol Doda's tits, meaning the bookstore's billboard neighbor, which, as it happens, is long gone.

He shook his head and said with a sigh, "Your generation." In wordless disapproval he drove us to North Beach. Nobody told any Carol Doda stories at One Pot, but they would have been welcome.

Karen Finneyfrock contributed a poem titled "Newer Colossus." Who is Karen Finneyfrock? I'd never heard of her, but I'll remember that night not for the soup or song but as the first time I heard that poem. The poets of 1968, mostly now demised, would have loved it, this evidence that their legacy is alive.

Photographers and video artists.

(Photo by Jared Boger in his southern gothic apocalypse vein, via i heart photograph.)

Real space is the place for sculpture. Painting goes online to flatten, change color and die. Only photo and video have the potential of retaining the essence of themselves. Image streams work for images that are meant to be reproduced. Everything else still needs an art critic.

If that's true, why is it that some of the best art criticism online is exclusively devoted to photography? Because nothing to do with art ever was or ever will be, fair.

Here's a photo of a billboard from Chris Daugaard: sky inside sky inside sky.

From Greg.Org: "Pro-Life, Except In The Case Of Decorating."

at the Republican National Convention. Police knew she was a journalist. Her press tag is unmissable.

China was widely criticized for arresting journalists during the Olympics, example here.

The Democracy Now host is charged with conspiracy to riot for the noncrime of arguing with police. She might on occasion conspire to put people to sleep, but taking her to jail in handcuffs is chilling.

Goodman has contempt for mainstream media. She might remember that in 1964 NBC's John Chancellor was arrested on the floor of the Republican Convention and said as he was hustled to the exit, "This is John Chancellor, somewhere in custody."

Back to the present: Below is the arrest of producer Nicole Salazar, forced to the ground while yelling, "Press! Press!" I bet nobody yelled that in China. Here, hopes for justice are higher. When hope isn't enough, there are backup cameras, which are as common as cell phones.

Says The Observer. List here, via AJ.

In the portion of the list devoted to movies, I love Paul Newman and James Dean's 40-second screen test in 1954 for "East of Eden," which went to Dean.

Part of the test was to improvise banter.

Dean to Newman: "Kiss me."
Newman to Dean: "Can't here."

In classical music, The Observer picked one of many featuring Leonard Bernstein rehearsing his 1985 version of "West Side Story," inexplicably saying it was a shame that Bernstein chose Kiri Te Kanawa and Jose Carreras for the leads. A shame? On what basis? Not sound, surely.

And speaking the Bernstein video, The Observer picked the wrong one, here. The one to watch is Carreras and Bernstein driving each other crazy in the interests of the product.

In visual art, the Francis Bacon clip is lovely, but the interviewer is flat. How much better Bacon was enagaging with a peer, most notably David Sylvester. Sylvester's interviews with Bacon are the best in the business. (There's a portion online here.)

What's missing from The Observer is the new. Everything here is signed, sealed and delivered. Where are the artists who are making their careers at least in part due to YouTube?

Matt Kresling's "The Beast That Swallows Its Young" is moving up fast on the YouTube Hit Parade. Anybody making a future YouTube arts list will have to include it for its music and video and maybe even its dance, not to mention its politics, which are heart of the matter.

Lee Rosenbaum on CultureGrrl has a great example of a painting disfigured through reproduction: Lee Krasner's "Shellflower" from 1947. It looks like a Pollock painted by Nancy Drew.

Pilar Viladas in New York Times took a look today at Roy McMakin's design of a Vashon Island farm house:

"There it stands, alone in a field against a backdrop of tall evergreens: a sweet little wooden farmhouse with a peaked metal roof and a diminutive concrete lean-to, looking like something from a children's book. Well, almost.

A closer look reveals that part of the building's second floor seems to be hovering in midair and a couple of its double-hung windows are folded crisply around corners, as if they were made of paper instead of wood and glass."

Story here, including an excellent slide show.

PI review of a McMakin exhibit at the James Harris Gallery here, and a PI review of his design for Western Bridge here.

From the Kirkland Arts Center's members exhibit, Don Myhre's "Temple of the God of Mammon." Through Sept. 6.

Previous post.

In the age of terrorism, your right to take a photograph can depend on who you are.

From Chasers War, posted by The Angry Fag:

In rural areas, strangers are suspect. From unregister user #167085 : Roberto Bellini's Landscape Theory".

In cities, where everybody is, from the police point of view, more or less a stranger, locals can't count on favorism. From Robert Zverina, via unregistered user 167235: "Jaywalking Q & A."

The Clash, "Know Your Rights," posted by hopita.

The OC Art Blog posted a photo of sign hanging high, maybe over a elevator that doesn't work, featuring the following false claim in multi-colored capital letters, "John F. Kennedy said: ART IS TRUTH.' " (Image here.)

What he said was, "We must never forget that art is not a form of propaganda: it is a form of truth."

I like the anonymous sign better. JFK's is a tad pompous, and why can't art be a form of propaganda? But nobody's going to argue with "Art is Truth." The sign maker blended Kennedy with Keats. (Keats: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty...") Anybody who has Keats running through her head, even this lesser Keats, can sit by me.

According to Greg.org, nobody cares about an arts policy this year. There's too much else at stake. Well, yes, but where art goes, so goes the nation.

If the canary is happy in the coal mine, we get out alive. A candidate who scorns art won't care about ice caps or owls, not to mention cleaning up the mess in Iraq and treating the rest of the world with respect.

About the following, Greg and I agree: "John McCain's arts policy is apparently not to have one. His website doesn't mention the arts, arts education, or federal arts organizations like the National Endowment for the Arts at all. His stated education policy makes no mention of the arts at all. I have a hard time trying to imagine an issue that would matter less to McCain and his campaign, much less to a McCain administration, and when the campaign can't pull together a comprehensible policy for technology and the internet, an articulated arts policy seems unlikely to come during McCain's lifetime, even."

But Greg calls Obama's policy "a tiny bundle of noncommittal platitudes..."

Harsh. At this point, it's the thought (or lack of it) that counts.

Below, Obama tackles the issue from the education angle. Sounds good to me.

ARTSVOTE 2008 has specifics.

One more thing: Greg dismisses as minor a "a tax code tweak proposed by Senator Leahy that lets artists donate works to museums at fair market value." Obama supports it. If that tweak goes through, it would be huge.

In Little Rock, Ark., 1957, a white mob taunted students trying to cross the color line. Thanks to AP's Will Counts, we know what the scene looked like. He made the moment immortal with his photo of the young Elizabeth Eckford attempting to walk down the street after Arkansas National Guardsmen blocked her entry at the schoolhouse steps.

In "Children of Crisis," Robert Coles wrote about young people confronting the inbred bigotry of social systems. According to Coles, few of the adults who delivered the trauma renounced their previous behavior. Most simply toned themselves down, and because the civil rights movement successfully called them to higher ground, forgot they had ever run on fever pitch. Their racism became covert and less dangerous.

A prime example of covert is the white man in the Simi Valley interviewed by Jane Gross of The New York Times (here) after the Rodney King verdict. Defending his town against the charge of racism, he told her, "There's a black person up our street and we say "Hi' like he's a normal person."

Is there a better one sentence self-portrait in American journalism? What happened to him since then? Covert can roll back into overt or disappear, depending on the context.

C. Vann Woodward documented a dramatic slide into the negative in "Tom Watson: Agrarian Rebel." Watson started his career as a reformer and a populist, but he dug deep for the hate after he'd lost elections for being insufficiently hostile to black people. It didn't happen again. He was a key supporter of the deadly revival of the KKK in 1915.

Woodward's book came to mind after reading Robert A. Caro's NYT essay on Thursday, "Johnson's Dream, Obama's Speech."

Like Watson, Johnson had populist roots, and his rise through Southern politics demanded that he stand with the old guard: "During his first 20 years, 1937 through 1956, in the House and Senate, he had voted against every civil rights bill -- even bills aimed at ending lynching."

His political ambition exceeded his moral one. Unlike Watson, however, Johnson was operating on a national stage. Late in the 1950s, "he realized that he would never become president unless he removed the 'magnolia scent' of the South."

In the national context, he was better off with his better self.

That's why he was able to lead a successful effort to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1965. It was an about-face that stunned Martin Luther King Jr., who'd given up on LBJ only to find him leading the charge.

Caro quotes part of the speech that made King, who never cried, cry: "Even if we pass this bill," Johnson said, "the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life."

He paused, and then he said, "And we shall overcome."

When Seattle Art Museum director Mimi Gates announced her retirement in June, she was credited with an agreement struck with Washington Mutual. By sharing real estate with WaMu, SAM was able to afford its 2007 expansion.

Former Getty Museum director John Walsh was among those who congratulated her on going where no major art museum had gone before, into a space share with a bank: "She got a huge amount of space right where she wanted it in a great design that will allow for expansion in the future."

Initially, the idea wasn't thrilling. "Lie down with a bank, get up with pinstripes," I groused, but the reality of Brad Cloepfil's design won me over.

The question of money didn't come up. It should have.

In a story titled, "Mortgage woes continue to wallop WaMu," PI business reporter Bill Virgin shared the bad news late in July:

"Washington Mutual Inc. reported the biggest quarterly loss in its history -- $3.3 billion in the second quarter -- as it furiously stuffed more money into loan-loss reserves in an effort to keep ahead of a rising tide of mortgages gone bad. The quarterly loss was the third in a row of more than $1 billion for the Seattle-based consumer bank and mortgage lender, and was slightly more than the first two combined."

What does this mean to SAM, which rents WaMu eight floors of what will eventually become museum space? What if WaMu turns into a deadbeat roommate?

Nicole Griffin, the person responsible for delivering SAM's messages, says the museum's covered.

SAM's reasoning includes the following: "Provisions have been made in SAM's agreement with WaMu that would protect the museum in the event of a change of control at the bank. Thanks to the provisions in the lease, WaMu has the capacity to sublease the space to another tenant if necessary."

Guess everything's OK then. On the other hand, if WaMu folds or constricts to a shadow of itself, what kind of business will need or want to take over the lease?

Robert Frank's "The Americans" was published in 1955. Zoe Strauss' "America" will be published later this year, news via Heart As Arena.

Her blog here. Her flickr photo stream here. Her flickr photostream in the Pacific Northwest here.

Advance "America" orders here.

Dead Science could be the title by which our era becomes known, especially if the government fails to change hands. In the 21st century, Millet's "Man with a Hoe" no longer functions solely as a symbol of abused labor. When I think of the painting, I see my contemporaries, those who are so detached from the consequences of their consumption that they need a weather man to know which way the wind blows.

They are the ones who won't let Warhol help them think their way From A to B and Back Again. No wonder they are now the subject of Edwin Markham's poem and the object of the the final line's query: "Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?"

Ashleigh Rauen & Tom Chapel, from their installation, "Final Crisis," at Vermillion Gallery, part of The Villainaire Festival of Culture, produced by The Dead Science

In Seattle, however, The Dead Science is a sign of a different sort. It's a band influenced by hip-hop with plenty of light in its collective of craniums. Sept. 1-7, it's producing a week-long arts festival titled "The Villainaire Festival of Culture," with music, performance, visual art and lectures. It's not just a band, it's an all-arts cornucopia. (Free admission unless otherwise noted.)

Schedule after the jump.

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Lawrence Halprin's Freeway Park in Seattle, with no artists on it. Image via realtravel.com

Lawrence Halprin's Keller Fountain in Portland, with artists, via Alicia J. Rose

One of the things I love about Portland, Oregon: You can be anything. If I lived there, my business card would say, "Regina Hackett. Speaker in tongues."

The subject came up while reading a release from Portland's "The City Dance of Lawrence and Anna Halprin" with "The Third Angle New Music Ensemble." At the bottom of the list of choreographers, Randy Gragg gets a credit.

Randy Gragg? He's an art and urban spaces critic, formerly of The Oregonian and now editor of a fancy lifestyle magazine. It's way beneath his talents but not his pay grade. (Newspapers are floundering; lifestyle magazines are in the pink.)

Working there makes Gragg a sell-out. The term was an insult during the heyday of the counterculture but became a compliment during the Reagan administration. I'm sure I'd sell out if there were anyone to sell out to.

Back to "The City Dance of Lawrence and Anna Halprin," for which Gragg wrote what exactly? Advice on how to dance on concrete with water running under your feet? Hey, he's in Portland. Maybe he's going to sing.

The event is part of PICA's annual TBA Festival, list of events here.

Seattle has Bumbershoot; Portland has TBA. From an alternative arts point of view, no contest. TBA is tops, and Bumbershoot is close to a no-show.

Lawrence isn't the only Halprin getting a shout out during TBA. There's also a repeat of Anna Halprin's "Blank Placard Happening" from 1968, here. Reminds me of Kelly Mark's "Demonstration" from 2003. Good ideas are always in motion.