Last Weak  |  Index  |  Next Weak

Weak XXVIII

9 July 2026

No. 2,875 (cartoon)

Were you insulting me?

Of course not, I was merely describing you.

Oh, well that’s different.

10 July 2026

Frozen Charlotte

I pirated Jack White’s new music, Frozen Charlotte, a few hours after it was released earlier today. I enjoyed listening to it; it sounded real good like a Jack White album should. No surprises there; I’ve never heard him drop a stinker.

A few hours later, I couldn’t remember anything about the recordings except my positive response. I never thought about it before, but the only thing the sixty-some thousand tracks in my computer have in common is that I enjoy hearing them repeatedly; only then do I fully(?) comprehend them. Over the decades, I’ve learned to listen to them often enough to appreciate them more and more, yet not so frequently that I memorize them.

11 July 2026

Crap, Crapola, Utter Crap, and More Crap Redux

Annette called me after reading my notebook entry a couple of weeks ago (260626) in which I trashed Artforum. She said that I should have picked up the Summer 2026 issue of Art in America instead. I occasionally try to keep an open mind, so I went back to the library and had a gander.

She was right. The magazine she recommended also had nothing of interest, but had eighty-eight fewer pages of tedious crap, a definite improvement over Artforum.

12 July 2026

Archiving Chronicles, Part I

I printed photographs in my darkroom for over fifteen years until I became a pseudo-nomad and created everything digitally. Now that it’s about time to think about death cleaning (ask Margareta Magnusson to explain), I came up with a plan to shed my prints.

Before I go on (and on and on and on some more), I’ll pass along three relevant quotes.

“We have met the enemy, and he is us.”
—Walt Kelly, 1971

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
—Mike Tyson, 1987

”A journey of a thousand clicks begins with a single misstep.”
—Me, today

I borrowed Victor’s scanner, and was ready to digitize my first photograph when I made my first of many unpleasant surprises.

In April I chucked all my prints except the relatively few good ones I wanted to archive. I paused when I grabbed an eight-by-ten contact print for my first test: I should have recycled it. That’s when I discovered that making a curatorial decision about quality is one thing, but the ultimate test was whether an image was worth all the work required to archive it.

Back to winnowing ...

13 July 2026

Profit in Purgatory

I always enjoy my dental appointments. My dentist doesn’t make yacht payments, so she never finds a reason to drill for gold. In addition, she offers a large selection of old magazines in the waiting room, including the 1 June issue of The New Yorker featuring a full-page ad for an exhibit at the Gagosian Gallery.

Now here’s the crazy part: the Gagosian Gallery is selling Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp’s work at the same time the sneaky Frenchman has a huge retrospective at the real Museum of Modern Art less than three kilometers away! As Harry Shearer might say, ain’t that a nutty coincidence?

Of course it ain’t.

Three teams play the art game and feed off each other: museums, commercial galleries, and collectors. The Gagosian Gallery has certainly jacked up the price of the Duchamp works they’re selling, and the collectors whose donations financed the show will see the value of their Duchamp inventory go up and ... you get the picture. (Occasionally a living artist will get in on the game, but that’s messier and less profitable for the other players.)

There’s no artist I admire more than Duchamp, but I’m not sure what he’s doing in that venue. Perhaps the trustees should rename it: The Museum of Formerly and Currently Modern Art.

I’ll let the wily artist have the last word.

“No painting has an active life of more than thirty or forty years—that’s another little idea of mine. I don’t care if it’s true, it helps me to make that distinction between living art and art history. After thirty or forty years, the painting dies, loses its aura, its emanation, whatever you want to call it. And then it is either forgotten or else it enters the purgatory of art history.”

14 July 2026

Art in the Obits

After kvetching about Artforum and Art in America, I was reminded of the only place I know to discover living artists I like: the obituaries. I don’t want to split hares (I’d never do that, Bugs!), but being dead enough to make it into the obits means that they were my living contemporaries until a few days ago.

I’m thinking of Wim T Schippers, a Dutch hombre whose work I quite like. I never heard his name until he popped his clogs and a Rotterdam museum exhibited his 1962 piece, Pindakaasvloer (Peanut Butter Floor). Schippers instructed the fabricators to spread four hundred kilos of peanut butter on the gallery floor “as smoothly and monotonously as possible ... without any educational purpose.”

I hope no one releases mice in the gallery to make it an interspecies interactive work. I like the idea, but that right result in an educational purpose and/or dead meeces.

I wish the obituary editors would publish an arts rag; they seem to be about the only ones who know who the good contemporary artists are.

15 July 2026

It’s All Greek to Me

Here’s my favorite headline d’jour:

Pete Hegseth says soldiers over age 30 to be screened for testosterone deficiency

US defense secretary unveils plan that will work to ensure service members have the “right testosterone levels”

Ten-hut! Whiskey Pete’s at it again. The self-declared Secretary of War is a sexist, racist, homophobic incompetent. And in other news, the sun rose in the east this morning. As he strives to banish anyone who’s not a heterosexual, Christian, Caucasian man from his ranks, he’s now going to have all his “war fighters” tested to ensure his manly men have more than enough testosterone to attain “the leading edge of lethality.”

My guess is that he just watched Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and had another wet dream about the ideal twenty-first-century soldier. That’s only a guess; when it comes to a lunatic’s Neanderthal fantasies, it’s all Greek to me.

16 July 2026

P I Z Z A

The first time I photographed this window I ended up with IZZA, so I returned today with my serious camera to make the image I’d envisioned, P I Z Z A. Had I waited much longer, I would have missed it: Golden Edge Pizza went flukes up; it’s being replaced by an appliance store.

Coming next weak: more of the same.

Last Weak  |  Index  |  Next Weak
©2026 David Glenn Rinehart