Robert Rauschenberg (American, b. 1925), Retroactive I, 1963, oil on canvas, 83 7/8 x 59 7/8 inches, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, © Robert Rauschenberg

Art and politics link up more often than I find interesting but Artnet's list of Obama, McCain and Clinton contributors is interesting (though totally irrelevant to anybody but art geeks). Sure, artists like Cecily Brown and Chuck Close might support Obama and Matthew Marks might have supported Clinton but ultimately it says more about the donors than the candidates. Is there an artist on the planet whose endorsement effects me? No .... So sure, I like Obama and have had coffee with McCain (the obviously exhaused guy was in Portland looking for a place to sit down at the 'Faz on 23rd back in 2000, I made room for him at the small table)... though there is no way I can vote for a war hawk, etc. My point, it's amusing to mix political and art trivia sometimes.

Sometime PORT contributor Brad Carlile has a lil photo tour of Chelsea (nothing new but nice to see, especially the Rauschenbergs... though I miss his messier ways).

Bob Hicks had a nice piece in The Oregonian about The Dancer at PAM. Amazing... it's a clear, well written piece as opposed to the "vague = balanced" school of journalism (whose practitioners days are #ed, but if this is any indication Bob Hicks deserves to keep his job). The show is really good and the bottom floor of the exhibition really takes off with a a Baudelarian sense of decadence and ennui rather than the bourgeois fluff we usually see from impressionists (fatefully, CB translator and poet James McGowan was my first creative writing teacher in college). All three Degas Forian and Lautrec make biting social commentary that breaks down the status quo of pre-modern patronage while literally creating modern modes of advertising and other new modes of social strata intermingling.