Here it is mid-August, and I am only just now telling you about the summer's most exciting show. I mean "Dada," and if I have taken far too long to break the news, you can easily understand why.

For once a blockbuster does what the word suggests. Instead of attracting long, orderly lines, the explosion leaves shrapnel everywhere. For a movement dedicated to destroying fine art, Dada sure made a lot of it. At least they left a great deal of its wreckage behind. At the Museum of Modern Art through September 11, Dada spans two entrances, six cities, and four hundred fifty objects. It may never look this deft, messy, and just plain artful again.

"Some say Mr. Olney is too literary: he writes songs about Barabbas, John Dillinger and John Barrymore, all in a dark, brooding style influenced by the Texas singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt. But if Mr. Olney's tight, powerful, empathetic and highly literate writing make him an outsider here, they're also what make him an insider in less commercial songwriting circles, with six albums recorded for the folk label Philo/Rounder all worth seeking out. One of the finest songwriters of his time, Van Zandt, who died two years ago, was once asked to name his favorite composers. He listed Mozart, Bob Dylan, Lightnin' Hopkins and David Olney."

- New York Times

Her maps are far spacial
flowers, ink blots with cleared
centers, of unknowing-- but their

From time to time we receive letters to the editor, and the following is a recent missive which we thought worthy of sharing. - ed

Dear Sharkforum,

Since the inadequacy of certain Art Institute honchos and the sad state of painting are popular topics on this site, may I direct you to the current painting exhibition by Maureen Gallace in the Art Institute's contemporary section. The show, comprised of landscape and figure paintings in oil, mostly in the 12" to 15" range, is part of their "focus" series highlighting work by current artists.

Anyone familiar with 20th century painting will walk into this show and within about two minutes say to themselves "this is just a bunch of little fragments from Fairfield Porter paintings". That really is, it seems to me, about all there is to the show when you boil it down. These little things are hung repetitively in an eye-level line along the wall. They seem to be after some postmodern exploration of pointlessness and arbitrary imagery ("Gallace's subject matter ultimately emerges as repetition, and thus, as painting itself", says James Rondeau in the show pamphlet), with a little painterliness and nostalgia mixed in to make them seem "fresh" as opposed to a Tuymans/Richter retread. This show is exemplary of the walking-dead, beaten-down state of institutionally-sanctioned painting today.

An article in the International Herald Tribune caught my eye the other day and I clipped it out to save. Titled “Moody, snooty artists? Blame the Romantics,” by Alan Riding who asks when did Western societies start venerating artists “…as sensitive misunderstood geniuses?” (Thursday, July 20, 2006)