Comparatively, Portland has a lot of art writers... even for a city twice its size and there is a lot of online content to keep up with. Here are some of the best links from PDX and abroad.

The Oregonian's Victoria Blake had a nice review of Eunice Parson's show. Recently there was an appropriate quashing of the latest Portland Art Center show too. For comparison here is PORT on Parsons.

I felt the Parsons show was strong, mature and probably a bit overhung. Not too original (with collage does that matter?) but definitely a valid modernist redux from an octogenarian artist.

The Mercury's John Motley reviews Chris Johanson this week. Last week Justin Westcoat Sanders wrote about the Steve Gutenberg show, stupid but entertaining. Also, the Merc now features the same horrid site redesign that Seattle's The Stranger has inflicted upon its readers.

On Artnet, Donald Kuspit tries to explain the reduction of images into code (and pixels) but misses the historical boat and forgets that the Industrial Revolution was all about making everything in a coded, highly replicable way. Pixels are just an extension of the modularity that the Gutenberg printing press, particle physics, Hargreaves' Spinning Jenny and Henry Ford's assembly line have innovated. That is "the code" modern painters are intuiting. Kuspit's real flaw is coming at it as an art historian instead of a historian. Modern and contemporary art history's epistemology needs lots of help, mostly because it's so new.

The last, but in many ways best link is to the Walking Portland blog. Portland is a city of walkers and that aspect really separates it from places like Seattle, Phoenix and LA etc. In my daily wanderings I notice things and mix with billionaires and bums in a way that profoundly effects my consciousness. It's urban and somehow riding around in a car is inherently suburban. Walking and Portland's appeal to a mass of artists are very related.