I receive regular updates from Paul H-O on the progress of his film Guest of Cindy Sherman, which I saw at the Tribeca Film Festival in May.

In the category of striking while the iron is hot: His email from yesterday (November 25), eleven days after Sherman's opening at Metro, announces a list of festivals where the film has recently screened, an upcoming Christmas party, a new DVD release and a blog address. It also points out that, for the first time since 2003, Ms. Sherman has made The Power 100 list of ArtReview magazine. She is number 82, with the following text:

What better testament could there be to Sherman's place among the artworld elite than this year's release of Paul H-O's Guest of Cindy Sherman, a documentary about H-O's (Hasegawa-Overacker) five-year relationship with the reclusive art celeb and the ego erosion - 'subjective detumescence', as the academics would say - that befalls him (Sherman last appeared on the Power 100 in 2003)? H-O plays the Oscar-wife to Sherman's A-list life, but still manages to offer perhaps the most unmediated portrait ever made of (or by) the artist. And after all that, she still looks good.

Much as I enjoy H-O's activities and his in-your-face subversion of art world proprieties, I find it nothing short of amazing that ArtReview's entire text on Sherman's "power" is based on her appearance in his film. Does this say something about AR's priorities of fame and reputation? Sherman is found on page 146 of the November issue. On page 145 is Jerry Saltz, number 79, who is allowed a full page meditation that includes the following:

I love being on the ArtReview Power 100 List. People congratulate me and I get to pretend that I don't really know about it or care. Before making the list, I made fun of it; now that I'm on it, I dread being taken off...
I may be part of the power structure, but I don't write for power...If I get fired by New York Magazine I will lose my so-called power; hopefully I wouldn't lose whatever credibility I have, or don't have, with readers. Power is about money, fads, fickleness and folly; it's what the world gives. Credibility is what you give yourself, what cannot be taken away.

No way, per se, to fault this high minded peroration. Nor the scrumptious petit fours that he might have enjoyed at Per Se.