Insects in Art History:



(Classical Maya, 18th C. Japan, and 17th C. Dutch)

Track 16 Gallery (click here)

“Art doesn’t lose its emotional or artistic value. That doesn’t change no matter what the economy.”

--Michael Govan, director of LACMA

Jeffrey Vallance (click here)

Good Spin (click here)

Yet in this last nationally televised encounter between the candidates, passivity may have been enough. Mr. Obama’s main goal was to calmly deflect the attacks, sit on his lead, not make any mistakes and not give voters any reason to second-guess their increasing support for his candidacy.

Even if Joe the Plumber still won’t vote for him.

(I've always been a sucker for seventeenth century Dutch and Flemish art. I'll be teaching this stuff to my painting students tonight.)

Anatomy studies from my life drawing class. (We also visit the cadaver lab on campus, which is as much an existential experience as it is an artistic one.)

(Some images of Big Holes my dear friend Dave sent me last night.)

The Bingham Pit Copper Mine in Utah (I've been to this one):

The now-defunct, dug-by-hand Kimberley Diamond Mine in South Africa:

The Diavik Mine in Canada:

This entire election season has been a long-running saga about the rise of women in American politics. On Thursday, it all went sour. The people boosting Palin’s triumph were not celebrating because she demonstrated that she is qualified to be president if something ever happened to John McCain. They were cheering her success in covering up her lack of knowledge about the things she would have to deal with if she wound up running the country.

--Gail Collins

Diego Rivera's enormous hands rising up in anger at the Greedy Capitalist Conspiracy that enslaves the workers of the world:



Though kind of politically heavy-handed, these Depression-era frescos certainly have resonance now. I'm going to show these to my students tomorrow.