"Greater New York" is one of the most influential exhibitions for young and emerging artists presented in the city. In this, its third edition, the number of participating artists is reduced to 68 from nearly 200 in the 2005 version. Artists were given more room to construct environments and installations that represent the creative processes and its juncture with life. Glimpses of works by David Brooks, Franklin Evans, Lucy Raven, Hank Willis Thomas, Sharon Hays, Ishmael Randall Weeks and others are visible. Guest crucifixion by Jerry Saltz.

December 26, 2009. In the wake of the New Museum's announcement of a controversial exhibition drawn solely from the extensive collection of billionaire Dakis Joannou, one of their trustees and founder of the Deste Foundation in Athens, and slated to be curated by artist Jeff Koons, who is heavily represented in that very collection and who is a close personal friend of Joannou, there has been a glut of commentary both pro and con. Mostly con.

Many resent the obvious conflicts of interest and the elitist monopolization of the finite resources of the art world by just a few players, who strive to dominate, manipulate and benefit their own interests to the exclusion of all others. Many find this cronyism quite reprehensible, and feel it represents "business as usual" at the New Museum, entrenched abuses of power and privilege that the current "Joannou-gate" has merely made more glaring.

James Kalm makes a pilgrimage of fandom to the book launch party for Jerry Saltz’s latest literary endeavor “Seeing Out Louder”. The sequel to “Seeing Out Loud”, this edition features reviews, essays, and thought pieces that display the wit and observational acuity that have established Saltz within the top fifty most influential individuals in the contemporary art world.

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.

A response to the Jerry Saltz review in New York Magazine.

Martha Rosler has typically been too pat and jejune in her politics, and in her assumption that it makes for good art, and Jerry Saltz correctly nails the rehash aspects of the current Mitchell-Innes & Nash show. The word "on the street" (in this case West 26th) is that Rosler is breaking no new ground, merely updating and enhancing both the scale and production values of her familiar collaging of images. Once they were taken from the Vietnam battlefield and conflated with magazine clippings from the home front: fashion models, washing machines, living room sofas and credenzas, Playboy nudes. Now they include some "relevant" Iraqi/Afghani footage - burkas and amputees - and benefit from Photoshop. Rosler might have succeeded in "bringing the war home" in 1968, but as Thomas Wolfe said, "You Can't Go Home Again". The epithet "pretty war porn" might be a bit harsh, but it is not that far from the mark.