I'll have a pretty complicated review for you later today (*I lied, but its coming soon). Till then here are some links:

Tyler Green is excited about Fritz Haeg, we are too and he will be showing at Reed this Fall. His talk at PSU was one of the highlights year last year, he's a major artist. (Aside) during undergrad I had a nasty habit of planting delicious swiss chard in my alma mater's many flower beds... let's just say the food service on campus did not provide a lot of things I found edible!

Jerry Saltz is Jeff Koon's greatest advocate (besides Koons himself). Jerry takes a look at his retrospective here. Ill be seeing this show for myself in a bit.

The Expanded Field discusses Public Art in LA. We have 2% for art up here... but we are a long way from being Chicago, which IMHO has the best collection of recent public art on earth. How good? the last time I was there my more vocally inspiring GF and I spontaneously broke into a version of the Everly Brothers "All I have to do is Dream" replacing that lyric with "Bean"... the nickname for Anish Kapoor's incredible Cloud Gate sculpture. No other public art has even a remote chance of provoking public song! (thankfully)...

Did you read the article? The second to last sentence reads: "But of all the 'presentations' here, Haeg's is the least original and the least exciting." Doesn't exactly sound 'major' to me.

I'm being half sarcastic and counterintuitively conflicted when I say excited. There is also a difference between that which is deemed "exciting" and what gets one "excited." A void of excitement can get a writer excited.

I dont think Tyler was excited about the presentation (the gordon matta clark retro was pretty dull too, Tyler said as much, yet he liked it). Still, counterintuitively there is something about the work that does excite people enough to write about it.

The fact that Haeg usually conjures the whole "that's not art" response and creates problems for good art writers tells me he's got something. I think a great deal of it is his utter ambivalence towards the art game in major institutions.

Excited in my book doesn't always mean "in love with". Major artist's create conflicted responses.

So if you're being "half sarcastic and counterinuitively conflicted", should, we as readers, consider everything that you write through an ironic lens? Seriously. What's that whole thing about unreliable narrators?

I always take what I write with a grain of salt laced with conflicted irony and it's amusing how some miss that and just take everything at face value.

Im with Debord's theory that a critic makes a spectacle of being the ideal spectator... is it possible to be such a ridiculous thing? and if so isnt it just a travelogue of inconsistent thoughts about experiences?

A critic isnt a narrator either and its more than an opinion... it's a kind of diagnosis and sometimes we live for finding something that alludes our existing taxonomies.

Obviously, those that know you take what you say with a shovel of salt. But the rest of us are kind of left in the dark Are you saying that Haeg is a major artist, or does is he 'excite' you in the same way that he 'excites' Tyler Green?

And why all the references to yourself? Who cares if you planted Swiss Chard in the flower beds? Especially, if it wasn't at Harvard or Yale or somewhere important.

I believe Haeg has what it takes to be a major artist and I think his work provokes me in a conflicted way similiar to how he provoked Tyler... Haeg doesnt operate purely as a creature of the art world. He's both too easy to write off (for reasons Tyler mentions) and impossible to ignore for reasons Tyler only touched upon.

Im working on another assignment writing about the critical process so here are some answers:

It's been my experience that most that consume this stuff realize I question what I believe but mean everything I say. It's just part of the critical process.

Also, by including details from my life where it is relevant to the art it becomes a conversationally toned way of understanding the spectacle of discussing art. I agree my experiences probably dont matter but that's not the point, Haeg and Kapoor elicit personal responses.

As it goes, I'm predisposed to liking Haeg and Kapoor and I question it as maybe some kind of tangential biographical tick? Besides, this post has an undercurrent of "how art effects us" and I chose to write what I know. Most every art writer has to include their own experience at some time when discussing what they run across.

I would never do a personal vanity blog... that's proprietary stuff and probably dull.... yes even duller than this.