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Shotgun Paintings

An American sniper.

"Zombie Formalism"

Articles that "coin" phrases often concern the relationship between art and the market.

Rose (2014)

For his Artnet News "Daily Pic" (entitled "Monique Mouton Paints Painting's Death"), Blake Gopnik gives us this:

I don't believe that painting is dead. I do believe that every substantial painting has to acknowledge–visually­–the pathogens threatening it: Its painfully close ties to the .01%; its long-time ownership by guys wielding big hairy sticks; a vast, overshadowing history of past excellence; a vast, overshadowing present of gross mediocrity (the worst mall art is almost all painted). The second I saw Monique Mouton's picture called “Rose", now in a group show at Wallspace in New York, it struck me as wearing its symptoms with pride. A classic, Greenbergian shaped canvas, ultimate symbol of painting-for-painting's-sake, becomes the bearer of clutching, bloody hand prints, as though the medium has been shot and is trying to keep from bleeding out.

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Crackers on Commercial

Hard to believe that bluegrass was once the punk rock of its day. The only thing that distinguished it from whatever else was on offer at the Grand Ole Opry was the speed of its delivery, which is to say fast.

As to bluegrass's cross-cultural appeal, check out Robert Altman's Nashville (1975), the scene where country singer Tommy Brown, his wife and friends, do their best to sit through a bluegrass song.

Crows on Commercial

Every day at dusk crows travel southeast across the city to somewhere deep in Burnaby. Usually their flight pattern follows the railway line that begins (or ends) at Main and Terminal, but on this day they converged a little north of there.