Ahhh there is nothing better than one architect (Charles Rose) talking smack about another one (Brad Cloepfil), while name dropping Kanye West ...and when the commenters on Portland Architecture start bringing electricity, sidewalks, straight A students in NYC and whether Portlanders are qualified to identify a cow or not it's like the smell of napalm in the morning!

Oh and the oft reactionary Peter Plagens attempts to besmirch Tyler Green and other art bloggers with some lazy blanket rhetoric and gets utterly "pwned" (look it up Peter, it is already passe). At PORT we make pretensions of serious art criticism and back it up, along with first on PORT news and important clarifications when rank disinformation is being published as fact.

*Update: Peter Plagens responds to Tyler Green's response... sounds like writers like to focus on other writers like artists focus on other artists, they look closely at the parts they like and leave the rest. Not surprising really but in grad school my profs spent a lot of time and energy to break us of those habits. If anything it just seems like non blogger art writers envy the freedom of blogging. I can say there is a tremendous exercise in self restraint that one has to engage in if you are going to blog much. Ive seen some rather talented traditional writers use a blog in very ill advised ways (from a legal standpoint even).

*Update Update (thanks to Jessica's web surfing): Discussion producing blogger Edward Winkleman takes on the subject of what a blog is and 50+ comments ensue. PORT isn't a typical blog, we are intentionally stretching the format. Why?... partially because Portland needs more thoughtful critcal art writing and the scene's rapid changes in sophistication require much more dynamic, internationally-relevant publishing.

I like Edward Winkleman's response to this issue: http://edwardwinkleman.blogspot.com

Yes, very interesting, thanks Jessica (I was slightly let down when Winkleman didnt do the affair at the jupiter art fair last year)... Ill put a permanent link to that subject in the post.

It does highlight some unique things about PORT. We are acting more like a journal and less like some individual's take. We publish a lot of critical writing too and we pretty much picked the blog format as an experiment and as a way to evolve the blog format. As things have progressed weve found a lot of the limitations and advantages of blogging and we are discussing what is the next step.

PORT readers should expect us to further evolve that form in a few months.