[Caveat lector – reporter is largely ignorant of recent European history; comments welcome.]

Willoughby Sharp was a man of art, in the old fashioned sense Thomas Craven meant it. He was fully committed to every facet of a life spent waiting on the muse, wherever it would lead him, from the meanest squalor and confusion to the grandest scene of triumph.

12 18 08 NYC – Today two text messages directed me to go to the New School University for a press conference of occupying students at 10:30 a.m. – I had just time to gulp a cup of coffee and drag off across town. Lucky I’m staying in the Golden Apple this month. When I got there, a clutch of some 20 or 30 students were milling about in front of the New School looking nervous.

rev billy

summer exhibition at Brooke Alexander Gallery
http://www.baeditions.com/Installation%20Views/Colab%20Redux/Colab%20Red...

Colab (officially Collaborative Projects, Inc., founded 1977) was one in a string of New York City artists’ groups that started most strongly in the 1960s. Artists’ groups have had an escalating impact on the conventional art world. Today a number have roughly equal status with prominent individuals.

[Note of disclosure: I was a member of Colab, and have published on the group’s activities.]

Gustave Courbet (portrait by Nadar; public domain)

Upon my return from Miami Basel, I have a bad morning dream, a common one for art historians. I am preparing to participate in a panel discussion... the chair, a friendly man I know slightly (who was he?), approaches me as everyone readies: "Where are your slides?" he asks. I have none. And no notes. I don't even know the topic. "I thought this was an informal colloquium kind of thing," I reply.

On the Functions of Documenta
Radical Culture Research Collective

The Summer of Love show at the Whitney Museum is great fun. It’s full of experiences – walk-in and peer-in rooms and boxes, kinetic sculptures, video and film, album and underground newspaper covers, photos of celebs and jes folks, and even some painting and sculpture. Coming from the Tate Liverpool, the show’s strategy is to represent visual culture rather than high art. That’s cool. You can almost hear the music and taste the drugs…

...is how I thought of the chubbier part of the Biennale de Montreal that I saw in mid-May. (The show is suburbanized, and I'm on foot here.) It was a long weekend, being Victoria Day on Monday. Sigh. The city is deserted. It would look rather like Surrealist Paris if all those lovely statues in the square with their beaux arts nymphs and goddesses hadn't been spoiled by being topped by a stuffy looking man in a suit. It's like putting a turd on an ice cream Sunday. At least the seagulls are shitting on the King's head...