The Guardian reports that Saatchi has teamed up with an auction house to provide free admissions.

Steven Holl's new Nelson-Atkins Museum expansion has people raving, be it from Paul Goldberger to Tyler Green. I keep thinking somehow that the failure of the Bellvue Art Museum in Seattle cost Steven Holl the MoMA gig and we all lost out with a rather conservative museum. Hell, even the new Seattle Art Museum (which is basically a lil MoMA) seemed to be created in the shadow of BAM's sad sad failure. The very best living museum architects are (in no particular order): Herzog & de Meuron, Tadao Ando and Renzo Piano because they all seem to be able to create iconic architecture that is also ideal for viewing art (Koolhaas, Libeskind and Gehry are way more idiomatic). Is Holl about to crack into the top tier by being both fresh and subtle?

PORT pals Ultra PDX do what we don't do here, focus on PORT staff outside of art making or relevant art opinions. Their latest Ultra Q focuses on PORT business manager Jenene Nagy. In the past they've asked some blond PORT people a few questions as well.

Also, I Dont Know (an excellent site I just became aware of) found what I had to say about Bryan Shellinger useful for discussing Tomma Abts. I definitely had her in mind as well but I had to draw the line somewhere in that orgy of abstract painter namedropping. Always exciting when there is a little intellectual feedback, thanks. Oh yes and "escdotdot" I agree, in most cases riding a fence just means the artist is hedging but in my Schellinger review I was indicating that those additional complications actually worked in this case.

My point was also that abstraction today seems to be fond of impurities that would have been heresy years ago (unless you count Pollock's cigarette butts etc). Maybe there was always an impure element in abstraction that just never gets talked about because the old postmodern discourse was too busy trying to paint modernism as some narrow, often greenbergian march towards progress, refinementand the future (one with no room orthe detritus of the present). Facts are both cubism and abstract expressionism were headily involved with collage as was Paul Klee (among others). Maybe it was all because Rauschenberg's combines were so much more overt about the use of collage that it was seen as the postmodern mashup.

But I digress... of course you really would have to had to experience Schellinger's show first hand to tell if it worked. There was something about kicking the candy around the room just made the show even more coherent. Now it is all clean again, but it is still a complicated/good show.

thanks, Jeff, for your kind words about my site. Some (non-art) friends were having difficulty keeping up with the arguments, so I've tried to summarise them in a new post. I kind of got carried away with my own particular interests at the end, but there you go!

From the postings on this site Portland sounds like a very vibrant place for art, I hope one day to be able to visit.

Yeah, the discussion of abstract painting often goes down some serious rabbit holes. I think that is on of the strengths of painting, it has all this baggage (history) it has accumulated over the years.

Sure it is confusing to most laymen when paintings get unpacked but I just tell my non-art freinds its like a sausage... you dont have to know the history to enjoy it, but it does help determine the quality of what you are about to consume.