Gustave Courbet (portrait by Nadar; public domain)

Is Spiral Jetty threatened by petro-greed? Two environmental organizations, Friends of the Great Salt Lake and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, recently alerted Nancy Holt, the widow of Robert Smithson, of a wildcat oil company seeking state permission to do exploratory drilling of the West Rozel Field, an underwater oil deposit in the Great Salt Lake just a couple of miles from Spiral Jetty. Holt appealed to her friends in the arts and media, urging them "to save the beautiful, natural Utah environment around the Spiral Jetty from oil drilling." Over a thousand emails of protest were sent to the Utah Public Lands Policy Coordinating Office, which in response has extended the period of public comment to February 13, 2008 on Application to Permit Drilling #08-8853.

Review of DEEP TRANCE BEHAVIOR IN POTATOLAND
(A RICHARD FOREMAN THEATER MACHINE)
by Joseph Nechvatal
DEEP TRANCE BEHAVIOR IN POTATOLAND

Sleep Dealer
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/news/2008/01/sleep_dealer

facebook
With friends like these ...
Facebook has 59 million users - and 2 million new ones join each week. But
you won't catch Tom Hodgkinson volunteering his personal information - not now that he knows the politics of the people behind the social networking
site

Tom Hodgkinson
The Guardian,

Saturday, December 1: Big Paintings

Made it to LaGuardia with time to spare, courtesy of a moving performance by Eric “to the airport” Payson. Adam Cvijanovic was already standing at Departures, draped in a long black leather coat, awaiting his dealer Becky Smith. We were on the same Jet Blue flight, beating the crush down to Art Basel, while also sidestepping New York’s first seasonal ice storm, due to arrive in less than twenty four hours. Several days (and several score of Art Basel events) later, I would eventually view his panoramic landscape painting, huge, green and vegetal, which wrapped around the walls of the Bellwether booth at NADA and was one of the hits of
that particular fair.

A stiff tailwind brought us into Ft. Lauderdale 45 minutes ahead of schedule. I judged this a good omen. It allowed me to spend some quality time in Wynwood before dropping off my luggage at my Miami apartment. I cruised by various tents still under construction (Scope, Photo Miami, AIPAD) and visited a number of local spaces which held “soft” openings that night for the local audience, in advance of the great influx.

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.