Okay. I admit it. You caught me. The New York Times did not invent blogging. I made that up. I also made it up that Roland Barthes invented Scientology, that consciousness is a dish best served cold, and that their is a King James Version of a book that, we all know, is the divine and unalterable word of God.

Now, as for corporate blogging. Whether they do it or not, they should. And no, they shouldn't let their employees write freely about anything they want (and LMCC perhaps should not either, which is the subject of this conversation). They should fake like they do. Do you trust positive customer reviews on Amazon? I don't, because I assume the same principle could be at work.

Now, as for lying. Perhaps there really wasn't a post removed. Maybe I made that up too. It is beside the point. The point was, if there had been an imbecilic post, and if we are going to do something stupid like allow everyone at LMCC to write whatever they want, I should have the opportunity to post next to it. I even have a certain responsibility to do so. Re-post it, and I will respond. I can't make fun of something that isn't there.

The more interesting question is whether this should be an open forum for the exchange of imbecilic ideas. Perhaps not. Perhaps this should be a blog about all the wonderful things we do at LMCC (A closed forum for the imparting of imbecilic ideas). It would, as a fact, be obvious to anyone (that is, anyone who could tell I was lying about the New York Times, Roland Barthes, and Scientology) that it is being written as a marketing device of the old style.

The model is Pindar. Look him up. Or better yet, just check the name in your Microsoft Word spell-check. Shall I do it for you? "Pander" is the suggestion. This is what we would be doing, and some of us have the ability to read through this type of crap to arrive at the information we are looking for: dates, locations, etc.

On the other red, red hand, we could try something a bit more sophisticated. We could use this blog as a way to make LMCC seem like an interesting organization. We could, for instance, talk about art. Strange idea, isn't it? Suddenly the issue of whether or not it is 'real' doesn't matter. All that matters is that what we say is compelling of more thoughts.

Pindaric writing on art is boring and would certainly not encourage anyone to actually read our now overly self-obsessed blog. Do you remember how Jerry Saltz wrote about the Matthew Barney's perpetual sideshow at the Guggenheim? It made me want to vomit plastic.

ASIDE...
Speaking of Jerry Saltz. He's written something of the Charline Von Heyl exhibition at Friedrich Petzel. It is a testament to the continuing inability of critics to write anything interesting about abstraction. They resort to streams of incoherent adjectives, like a thesaurus on speed. It is also a testament to Jerry Saltz's continuing belief that writing about art is writing about fashion. He boldly, and ridiculously, contends that 'representation' and 'abstraction' are left-over terms of a bygone era. I would offer him an alternative word for the chopping block: conceptual. I have yet to find a work of art in the world completely devoid of a concept.

MOVING ON...
Presenting LMCC as a united front, where every program we do is beyond criticism, is a waste of time. That is what press releases are for. The potential of a collaborative blog is democratic, which, if we're keeping up with our social contract theory, requires speaking convenient lies to power. We could, as we might be doing now, fake it. It doesn't matter at all. What matters is the content and delivery of our ideas. Democracy, it turns out, isn't a bad way to accomplish this.

We could, for instance, have a conversation about the receipt tent now sitting in our office. We could discuss, back and forth, how the implication of it's form is not justified by the actualization of it's form. We could talk about other works that attempt to comment diaristically, and for the most part ironically, on the realization of a 'self' through capitalism. We could talk about the sub-genre of sculpture currently plaguing the art world known as "tent art". Hell, we could talk about Henry Moore, and that most inexplicable idea called "negative space." There are, after all, far darker things underneath our beds. This is to say, there are plenty of things to talk about that fall under the category of "things about art worth talking about."

We could be an interesting model of an arts organization. We could be publicly self-critical. Is this shooting ourselves in the foot? It is if we believe being self-critical to mean the fruitless extolling of our individual tastes. This is not what being critical means. The word, "critique", means "to call into crisis." This is not panning or praising, but accepting that talking about art is a patient always in need of extensive surgery.

Now, I would like, if we could, to agree to extract ourselves from the black hole we've gone down (which is largely my fault), and get down to the business of talking about art, the institutions who need it so desperately to survive (that being the hydra known as critic/collector/dealer/curator), and what it is we have to do with it.

I'll offer a topic:

THOMAS NOZKOWSKI at Max Protetch

I think they are academic paintings parading as naive, which leads me to the conclusion that the work believes
1. Naivety to be akin to sincerity
2. That sincerity in art is virtuous
3. That virtue in art is a thing worth dealing with

I disagree, because I don't think art and virtue have anything to do with each other. Banking is immoral. Activism is moral. Art is, by definition, artificial, and therefore something else entirely.

And I would be interested to know what others think about the show and the issue of sincerity in art.