Art & Taxes

Senate Bill Lets Artists Claim Price for Gifts
November 22, 2005
New York Times
By Robin Pogrebin

Living writers, musicians, artists and scholars who donate their work to a museum or other charitable cause would earn a tax deduction based on full fair market value under a bill just passed by the Senate.

Currently such work receives only a deduction based on the cost of materials unless it is donated posthumously by the estates.

The measure was approved as an amendment to a broader $59.6 billion tax relief bill passed by the Senate early Friday. It now goes to a House-Senate conference committee. The House version of the tax relief bill does not include the arts provision, but the senators who introduced the amendment - Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, and Pete V. Domenici, a New Mexico Republican - said they were hopeful that the committee would support it.

Under the bill, artists could donate their work during their lifetimes at full market value provided that it is properly appraised and handed over at least 18 months after it is created.

The provision seems likely to open the way for more acquisitions by cash-strapped museums. "It's very important for cultural institutions and libraries to be able to be the recipient of these works of art that otherwise might go into private hands," said Mimi Gaudieri, the executive director of the Association of Art Museum Directors.

"Especially for small to midsize institutions with modest acquisition funds, as a gift from the artists, it's a great opportunity to enhance their collections," Ms. Gaudieri said.

The donated work must be related to the purpose or function of the museum or charitable organization receiving the donation.

Mr. Schumer, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, said the measure would even the playing field for arts donors. "Right now, artists are better off waiting until after they die to donate their works to a charity or a museum," he said, adding that the amendment "fixes that problem and treats artists the same as anyone else who works hard and wants to donate something to charity at the fair market or appraised value."

Arts professionals described the measure as long overdue. "Artists donate to cultural nonprofits or other nonprofits, and all they get is the cost of their materials," said Tom Healy, president of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, which represents arts groups downtown. "If you have a painting that's worth $5,000, you may be able to deduct $20 for the canvas."

As long as the work is physically tangible, it can be contributed as a deduction, said Robert L. Lynch, president and chief executive of Americans for the Arts, an advocacy group. "A score has value just like a painting," he said.

Applying the provision may present challenges for the Internal Revenue Service, given that appraising a work of creativity is often a highly subjective process. "It's a pretty new day in tax policy," said Dean A. Zerbe, a senior tax lawyer and investigator for the Senate Finance Committee. "It has the potential for people to want to go back and expand it."

He suggested that some professionals might seek a deduction for a product like a legal brief or a medical operation. "It's something the house will have to look at closely," Mr. Zerbe said.

The bill also comes with stricter rules for the qualifications of appraisers. "The public is now going to be made aware of what a qualified appraiser is," said Fran Zeman, the former chairwoman of the personal property committee of the American Society of Appraisers. "It's important for everyone to understand the importance of using someone who is qualified."

Ms. Zeman said that noncash contributions to charitable groups are often overvalued. The Internal Revenue Service has grappled with the valuation of donations ranging from automobiles to frequent-flier miles.

Mark W. Everson, the I.R.S. commissioner, raised that issue in testimony last spring before the Senate Finance Committee. "Valuation issues are often difficult," he said. "Overvaluations may arise from taxpayer error or abuse as well as from aggressive taxpayer positions."

Sackgasse

From dict.leo.org:

ENGLISH			GERMAN
			6 search results
Direct Matches
	close		die Sackgasse
	impasse		die Sackgasse
	blind alley		die Sackgasse
	cul-de-sac especially [Brit.]		die Sackgasse
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	dead-end street		die Sackgasse

Completed

Sackgasse
Acrylic latex on canvas
510 mm x 741 mm (about 20 in x 30 in)
2005

Hobart

(Direct prints of the bottoms of two Hobart dishwashing racks)
Acrylic on paper
each 20 in x 20 in
Germany, 2004

For anyone who has worked in a food service environment with a Hobart commercial dishwasher, these images may trigger memories. These patterns are only visible as watermarks for a few seconds after the trays are lifted off of a slightly wet stainless steel rack table. I decided that a direct print was the only way to truly capture the image. The process involved quite a bit of after-hours sneakiness, but we got it done. Here are the images to prove it.

Here's a picture of the real thing:

Work in Progress

Sackgasse
Acrylic Latex on canvas
510 mm x 741 mm (about 20 in x 30 in)

Inspiration #2

I'm not an athlete, and I don't like inspirational stories, especially sports-related ones. But this kid inspires me. I can only dream of being so fearless.

Blind Kansas football player lets folks see life’s possibilities
By Fred Mann
The Wichita Eagle

KANOPOLIS, Kan. — The task for Jason Hughes, defensive lineman for Kanopolis Middle School, was to fire out as soon as the football was snapped and hit somebody.

Anybody.

Knock somebody down and cause a pileup, said his coaches.

So in a couple of games this season, Jason, who is blind, lined up on defense and plowed into the first opponent he could locate at the snap of the football.

Twice, the person Jason plowed into happened to be carrying the ball.

Both collisions resulted in solid tackles, including one behind the line of scrimmage that resulted in a loss of yardage for the opposition.

Teammates cheered, and so did the crowd.

Even the kids lined up on the other side of the ball told him, “Good job.”

Jason, 13, has only memories of vision. He has plastic prosthetic eyes. Cancer claimed the real ones — the first when he was 18 months old, the second when he was 4½.

State and national high school officials said a blind student competing in football is rare, and perhaps unprecedented.

“As I’ve talked with people that have been around football longer than I have, they don’t remember a totally blind student participating in football,” said Jerry Diehl, assistant director of the National Federation of State High School Associations in Indianapolis.

Records for impaired athletes are sketchy, especially at the middle school level, he said.

But Rick Bowden, the Kansas State High School Activities Association’s assistant director who oversees football, said, “In my 13 years on staff, I cannot remember any student with that condition who’s ever tried to play football.”

Jason, an eighth-grader, played in only the last two games of the season, which ended in late October.

He had started the season as team statistician. He also snapped the ball in practices during drills and did other noncontact work with the team.

But standing on the sideline during games didn’t interest Jason. He learned the game as a kid from his older brother C.J., now a freshman defensive lineman at Chadron State in Nebraska, and he wanted to get onto the field.

“I never really had a thing for being a manager, or someone who doesn’t get in a game,” Jason said. “It’s not my opinion of being on a team.”

But he had to wait until both of his parents, including his father in Wyoming, signed a release form.

Then he had to learn the position and work on technique before Kanopolis coach Steve Bolton allowed him to play.

Jason’s mother, Bonnie, who moved with Jason to Ellsworth from Rock Springs, Wyo., last November after she and her husband separated, said she had no qualms about letting him play. She was used to having a son playing football, and Jason already was an athlete accustomed to contact. He had wrestled since age 7, and won his weight division at a tournament in Wyoming.

He’s also a risk-taker who once jumped out of a swing 12 feet to the ground in front of startled counselors at a camp for blind kids.

“He does things when I’m not looking, which is good because if I was looking I probably wouldn’t let him do it,” Bonnie Hughes said.

“I’ve gotten used to it. So if he wants to do it, I know he knows where his limits are and he’ll quit if it’s more than he can deal with.”

Bolton and his staff decided to try Jason at nose guard, placing him opposite the other team’s center. All Jason had to do was go forward at the snap of the ball and create a pile, they figured.

“Funny thing is,” Bolton said, “he didn’t just create a pile. If left unblocked, he got into the backfield and grabbed the first person that got in his way.”

Still, Jason said, it was “nerve-racking” the first time he went into a football game.

“It was awkward the first time to go out on the field against someone you knew was going to go full blast at you,” he said.

Jason had to be taken to the huddle, and positioned on the line. If the other team snapped the ball quickly, he could hear it and take off on his own.

If the other team changed the cadence, a linebacker playing directly behind him would, at the snap, tap him on whichever side of his rear he was supposed to rush.

If he didn’t run into anybody when he launched himself into the fray, he listened for footsteps.

The first time he made a tackle, Jason didn’t know he’d stopped the ball carrier. He was just plugging a hole, he said.

But on the second tackle, he knew.

“Ball carriers run different than linemen do,” Jason said. “I don’t know if it’s that they stand up, but they run differently.”

Opposing teams were told in advance that Kanopolis had a blind lineman on defense. But they were surprised by Jason’s tackles and began paying him the compliment of double-teaming and trapping him.

Jason wasn’t put into games for a few token plays. He played the last two quarters of his first game, and three quarters of the second game. The team won neither, finishing 0-7.

In Wyoming, he hadn’t been allowed to play at all.

“This school has been extraordinarily wonderful,” said Bonnie Hughes, who works in admissions at the hospital in Ellsworth. “If he wants to try something, they do all they can to figure out how to help him do it. They haven’t denied him anything.”

Jason, who gets A’s and B’s in his classes, also plays sousaphone in the school’s marching band. He holds onto a bar that’s attached to a set of drums so he can follow the band.

The band received a top rating at a competition in Ellsworth this year, and the judges didn’t find out until later that one of its musicians was blind, said Ken Cravens, principal of Kanopolis Middle School.

Next year, Jason will be a freshman at Ellsworth High School. He hopes to play football again.

“Football is just too fun. I can’t play it for just one year,” he said.

Ellsworth’s head coach, Ken Windholz, doesn’t rule out the possibility.

“I would be open to the opportunity. He’s demonstrated he can do some special things at the middle school. We’ll just have to see,” Windholz said.

Jason knows that doing something nobody thought was possible could inspire other blind kids to try new things.

“Blind kids don’t have to do just wrestling,” he said.

But so far, his example primarily has inspired those who can see.

Starting with his coach.

“Just watching him, it brings you a sense of joy to see there’s somebody that has the gumption to actually do something that a lot of other people would just sit back and say, ‘It’s not possible,’ ” Bolton said.

What is Your World View?

I'm a Cultural Creative. I don't like real personality tests and surveys, but online quizzes that offer absurd conclusions and sweeping generalizations make me laugh. This one actually put me in a pretty well-fitted box.

What is Your World View?
You scored as Cultural Creative. Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational.

1. 81% Cultural Creative
   
2. 75% Postmodernist
   
3. 63% Idealist
   
4. 56% Romanticist
   
5. 56% Existentialist
   
6. 31% Modernist
   
7. 31% Materialist
   
8. 31%Fundamentalist

The Belief-O-Matic quiz tells you what religion or faith you ought to practice. It also pegged me pretty accurately. My top three results were:

100% Liberal Quaker
98% Unitarian Universalism
92% Mahayana Buddhism

What's Your Spiritual Type? tells you how spiritual or religious you are. I scored 51 on their scale, which makes me a "Spiritual Straddler - One foot in traditional religion, one foot in free-form spirituality."

I guess I only like these kinds of quizzes when the results reaffirm my perceptions of myself!

Google = God (Part 2)

These are some pretty incredible ideas Google is exploring--searching your own genetic code?! I do love their online books, though. I find it much easier to browse and decide which book to buy (specifically nonfiction, on a specific topic). While their power makes me nervous, I'm very interested to see what else they can do.

What Lurks in Its Soul?
Washington Post
By David A. Vise
Sunday, November 13, 2005; B01

The soul of the Google machine is a passion for disruptive innovation.

Powered by brilliant engineers, mathematicians and technological visionaries, Google ferociously pushes the limits of everything it undertakes. The company's DNA emanates from its youthful founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who operate with "a healthy disregard for the impossible," as Page likes to say. Their goal: to organize all of the world's information and make it universally accessible, whatever the consequences.

Google's colorful childlike logo, its whimsical appeal and its lightning-fast search results have made it the darling of information-hungry Internet users. Google has accomplished something rare in the hard-charging, mouse-eat-mouse environment that defines the high-tech world -- it has made itself charming. We like Google. We giggle at the "Google doodles," the playful decorations on its logo that appear on holidays or other special occasions. We eagerly sample the new online toys that Google rolls out every few months.

But these friendly features belie Google's disdain for the status quo and its voracious appetite for aggressively pursuing initiatives to bring about radical change. Google is testing the boundaries in so many ways, and so purposefully, it's likely to wind up at the center of a variety of legal battles with landmark significance.

Consider the wide-ranging implications of the activities now underway at the Googleplex, the company's campuslike headquarters in California's Silicon Valley. Google is compiling a genetic and biological database using the vast power of its search engines; scanning millions of books without traditional regard for copyright laws; tracing online searches to individual Internet users and storing them indefinitely; demanding cell phone numbers in exchange for free e-mail accounts (known as Gmail) as it begins to build the first global cell phone directory; saving Gmails forever on its own servers, making them a tempting target for law enforcement abuse; inserting ads for the first time in e-mails; making hundreds of thousands of cheap personal computers to serve as cogs in powerful global networks.

Google has also created a new kind of work environment. It serves three free meals a day to its employees (known as Googlers) so that they can remain on-site and spend more time working. It provides them with free on-site medical and dental care and haircuts, as well as washers and dryers. It charters buses with wireless Web access between San Francisco and Silicon Valley so that employees can toil en route to the office. To encourage innovation, it gives employees one day a week -- known as 20 percent time -- to work on anything that interests them.

To eliminate the distinction between work and play -- and keep the Googlers happily at the Googleplex -- they have volleyball, foosball, puzzles, games, rollerblading, colorful kitchens stocked with free drinks and snacks, bowls of M&Ms, lava lamps, vibrating massage chairs and a culture encouraging Googlers to bring their dogs to work. (No cats allowed.) The perks also include an on-site masseuse, and extravagant touch-pad-controlled toilets with six levels of heat for the seat and automated washing, drying and flushing without the need for toilet paper.

Meanwhile, the Googlers spend countless hours tweaking Google's hardware and software to reliably deliver search results in a fraction of a second. Few Google users realize, however, that every search ends up as a part of Google's huge database, where the company collects data on you, based on the searches you conduct and the Web sites you visit through Google. The company maintains that it does this to serve you better, and deliver ads and search results more closely targeted to your interests. But the fact remains: Google knows a lot more about you than you know about Google.

If these were the actions of some obscure company, maybe none of this would matter much. But these are the practices of an enterprise whose search engine is so ubiquitous it has become synonymous with the Internet itself for millions of computer users. And if the Google Guys have their way, their presence will only grow. Brin and Page see Google (its motto: "Don't Be Evil") as a populist force for good that empowers individuals to find information fast about anything and everything.

Part of Google's success has to do with the network of more than 100,000 cheap personal computers it has built and deployed in its own data centers around the world. Google constantly adds new computers to its network, making it a prolific PC assembler and manufacturer in its own right. "We are like Dell," quipped Peter Norvig, Google's chief of search quality.

The highly specialized world of technology breaks down these days into companies that do either hardware or software. Google's tech wizards have figured out how to do both well. "They run the largest computer system in the world," said John Hennessy, a member of Google's board of directors, a computer scientist and president of Stanford University. "I don't think there is even anything close."

Google doesn't need all that computer power to help us search for the best Italian restaurant in Northern Virginia. It has grander plans. The company is quietly working with maverick biologist Craig Venter and others on groundbreaking genetic and biological research. Google's immense capacity and turbo-charged search technology, it turns out, appears to be an ideal match for the large amount of data contained in the human genome. Venter and others say that the search engine has the ability to deal with so many variables at once that its use could lead to the discovery of new medicines or cures for diseases. Sergey Brin says searching all of the world's information includes examining the genetic makeup of our own bodies, and he foresees a day when each of us will be able to learn more about our own predisposition for various illnesses, allergies and other important biological predictors by comparing our personal genetic code with the human genome, a process known as "Googling Your Genes."

"This is the ultimate intersection of technology and health that will empower millions of individuals," Venter said. "Helping people understand their own genetic code and statistical code is something that should be broadly available through a service like Google within a decade."

Brin's partner has nurtured a different ambition. For years, Larry Page dreamed of tearing down the walls of libraries, and eliminating the barriers of geography, by making millions of books searchable by anybody in the world with an Internet connection. After Google began scanning thousands of library books to make them searchable online, book publishers and authors cried foul, filing lawsuits claiming copyright infringement.

Many companies would have reached an amicable settlement. Not Google. Undaunted, Google fired back, saying copyright laws were meant to serve the public interest and didn't apply in the digital realm of search. Google's altruistic tone masked its savvy, hard-nosed business strategy -- more books online means more searches, more ads and more profits. Google recently began displaying some of these books online (print.google.com), and resumed scanning the contents of books from the collections of Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan, the New York Public Library and Oxford. But legal experts predict that the company's disruptive innovation will undoubtedly show up on the Supreme Court's docket one day.

From Madison Avenue to Microsoft, Google's rapid-fire innovation and growing power pose a threat of one kind or another. Its ad-driven financial success has propelled its stock market value to $110 billion, more than the combined value of Disney, Ford, General Motors, Amazon.com and the media companies that own the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. Its simplified method of having advertisers sign up online, through a self-service option, threatens ad agencies and media buyers who traditionally have played that role. Its penchant for continuously releasing new products and services in beta, or test form, before they are perfected, has sent Microsoft reeling. Chairman Bill Gates recently warned employees in an internal memo of the challenges posed by such "disruptive" change.

Microsoft also worries that Google is raiding the ranks of its best employees. That was threatening enough when Google operated exclusively in Silicon Valley. But it grew worse when Google opened an outpost in the suburbs of Seattle, just down the road from Microsoft headquarters, and aggressively started poaching. Microsoft finally sued Google for its hiring of Kai-Fu Lee, a senior technologist who once headed Microsoft's Chinese operations. Lee is now recruiting in Asia for Google, despite a court order upholding aspects of a non-compete clause that Lee signed while at Microsoft.

Google's success is neither accidental nor ephemeral. Brin and Page -- the sons of college professors who introduced them to computing when they were toddlers -- met in 1995 at Stanford, where they were both Ph.D candidates in computer science and technology. They became inseparable and set out to do things their own way. Professors laughed at Page when he said one day that he was going to download the Internet so he could improve upon the primitive early search engines.

Seven years ago, Google didn't exist in any form beyond a glimmer in the eyes of Brin and Page. Then in the fall of 1998, they took leaves of absence from Stanford, and moved their hardware into the garage and several rooms of a house in nearby Menlo Park. Armed primarily with the belief that they could build a better search engine, they have created a company unlike any other.

With Brin and Page setting the tone, Google's distinctive DNA makes it an employer of choice for the world's smartest technologists because they feel empowered to change the world. And despite its growing head count of more than 4,000 employees worldwide, Google maintains the pace of innovation in ways contrary to other corporations by continuing to work in small teams of three to five, no matter how big the undertaking. Once Google went public and could no longer lure new engineers with the promise of lucrative stock options, Brin invented large multi-million-dollar stock awards for the small teams that come up with the most innovative ideas.

A good example is Google's latest deal -- a far-reaching, complex partnership with NASA, unlike any agreement between a private firm and the space agency, to share data and resources and employees and identify ways to create new products and conduct searches together in space. Although NASA is a public entity, many of the details of the partnership remain hidden from public view.

Despite all that has been achieved, Google remains in its infancy. Brin likes to compare the firm to a child who has completed first grade. He and Page gaze into a glittering globe in the Googleplex that shows billions of Google searches streaming in from around the world, and notice the areas that are dark. These are the places that have no Internet access.

Quietly, they have been buying up the dark fiber necessary to build GoogleNet, and provide wireless Web access for free to millions or billions of computer userspotentially disruptive to phone and cable companies that now dominate the high-speed Internet field. Their reasoning is straightforward: If more people globally have Internet access, then more people will use Google. The more books and other information that they can translate into any language through an automated, math-based process they are developing now, the more compelling the Google experience will be for everyone, and the more wealth the company will have to invest in their vision.

Supremely confident, the biggest risk that Brin, Page and Google face is that they will be unable to avoid the arrogance that typically accompanies extraordinary success. Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos jokes that Brin and Page are so sure of themselves, they wouldn't hesitate to argue with a divine presence.

But the fact remains that they are human beings, and inevitably, both they and Google will make mistakes. Unless any of these prove lethal, however, Google -- through its relentless focus on disruptive innovation -- appears likely to wreak havoc on established enterprises and principles for many years to come.

Author's e-mail: vised@washpost.com

David Vise is a Post business reporter and the co-author with Mark Malseed of "The Google Story," published this week by Random House.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

Everyone Needs an Alter Ego

From the website of the Black-eyed Snakes, who are the musical side project of Alan Sparhawk, mastermind of slowcore phenomenon, Low:

"The first time I saw the Black-eyed Snakes, I thought I had walked into a parallel universe. Alan Sparhawk, typically a sedate and melancholy musician, appeared to be having some sort of epileptic fit. He was thrashing around violently and screaming sounds that didn't even sound human, let alone lyrical. Apparently, it was supposed to be blues he was singing, but it wasn't anything like blues I knew. He was like John Lee Hooker being electrocuted. Meanwhile, Bob Olson, Brad Nelson, and Justin Sparhawk backed him up on guitar and drums; their demeaner suggested they were not playing music but butchering pigs. The whole sound seemed to reach into my chest and drag out my soul like a vine. This wasn't a show, this was voodoo.

And I wasn't the only affected one. The room had the atmosphere of a back-ally Rottweiler fight. We all felt like something lowdown and sordid was going on, as if the vice squad might come crashing in at any moment and haul us away. And on some level, the Minnesota, Midwestern, Scandinavian level that makes us remain stoic, objective, and restrained, we felt like that wouldn't have been such a bad thing, for whatever it was that made poor Alan Sparhawk spaz out like that was making all of us do the same. It couldn't be legal.

Later, like an addict, I would return to show after show, and learn that Sparhawk kindly named his maniacal persona of his 'Chicken Bone George.' I also learned that when the spirit enters him, it has terrifying results, causing him to tear down ceilings, somersault off a drum kit and land flat on his back, to fall recklessly onto the floor and flip around, or even, godhelpus, cover Moby.

Since then, word of the group has spread. The group was voted 'Minnesota's Best New Band (2001)' by City Pages in Minneapolis and the reader's choice for the same honor in Duluth's Ripsaw. The band continues to pack hot, smoky rooms with freaked-out fans, and the icy Minnesota restraint seems to be melting just a touch. As the Snakes performed their greasiest song, '8-inch Knife,' at the last gig in a month-long weekly stint at a seedy dive in Superior, Wis., the dance floor looked something like an orgy. The Black-eyed Snakes are on to our dirty little secret. They know we're all hungry for a let-out, the real deal, the greasy meal, the knife in the back, so to speak. And they're going to give it to us, whether we like it or not.

Barrett Chase, Duluth's Ripsaw"

Containers

I'm fascinated by shipping containers. I see them pass by on the trains traveling through town, and I love their multitude of colors and logos contrasted with the monotony of identical forms.

I'm interested in modular forms and images, as well as basic commercial icons. I think of stretched canvases as being standardized and modular, much like these shipping containers. I like that these containers function on ships, trains and semis alike. I'd like my art to be so versatile!

I'm curious about any sculptural applications of these containers. I don't think of standard formats for sculpture in the same was as for painting. These containers are only shells: colors and logos (2D) applied to the exterior, objects and forms (3D) packaged inside.

I like the different views of shipping containers. They can be seen (albeit only in photos, or perhaps in port) stacked in giant blocks on ships, or strung out in a line so long you probably can't see the whole train, or more often pulled individually behind semi tractors.

Here is a link to a site just like I've been looking for: Intermodal Container Website. This site is specifically for shipping enthusiasts and train modelers, but if you browse the photos pages, you might see why I like it as well. So far my favorite shipping containers are Maersk Sealand and P&O Nedlloyd. I see both of these quite often on local trains.

Tuttle

Two With Any To, No. 1
Richard Tuttle
acrylic on plywood
1999

I don't know that I've seen much of anything by Richard Tuttle, but after reading this review, I like what he does. I don't like the look of all of the pieces featured in the article, but I love the materials he uses and the approach to creating the pieces.

40 Years of Making Much Out of Little
Art Review | 'The Art of Richard Tuttle'
November 11, 2005
New York Times
By Michael Kimmelman

HERE are a few things you might not notice in Richard Tuttle's sublime retrospective at the Whitney Museum. Blue gels tint the wall at the entrance that has his early tin "Letters" on it. The lights cast in slight shadow the shallow letters, which are a little like metal versions of toddlers' toys in cryptic alphabet shapes. "Replace the Abstract Picture Plane" - a grid of painted plywood panels, jaunty and framed in white - is off to the right. It looks as if it stands out from the wall. That's because it does, barely: the panels extend beyond their frames by the width of the plywood (or twice that width where the plywood sheets are doubled), while the backs of the picture frames aren't quite flush with the wall. They hang a quarter of an inch away.

Such whispering details, of which there are an endless number here, are at the heart of Mr. Tuttle's rapturous brand of intimism. For 40 years he has murmured the ecstasies of paying close attention to the world's infinitude of tender incidents, making oddball assemblages of prosaic ephemera, which, at first glance, belie their intense deliberation and rather monumental ambition. Never mind the humdrum materials and small scale. In the ambition department, Mr. Tuttle yields no ground to the Richard Serras of this world.

He has dreamed up his work out of such ostensible nothings as a three-inch segment of plain white clothesline nailed at the middle and on both ends to an otherwise empty white wall. Notice the cord's frayed edges; where the center nail interrupts the plaits; how, because it is so vanishingly small, the cord commands a psychic space in direct disproportion to its size. Pushing the buttons of skeptics for whom such stuff doesn't even qualify as art in the first place, the work addresses anyone with open eyes and an open mind about the basic ingredients of art-making, not to mention a little sense of humor.

Since the 1960's, and out of not just cord but also Styrofoam and florist wire and bubble wrap and twigs, Mr. Tuttle, now 64, has devised objects whose status is not quite sculpture or drawing or painting but some combination of the three, and whose exquisiteness is akin to jewelry. His show is a cross between a kindergarten playroom and a medieval treasury.

It arrives as a second act, 30 years after his last retrospective at the Whitney traumatized the New York art world. Back then, conservatives naturally heaped scorn on Mr. Tuttle's inventions, which, as the critic Thomas Hess then responded in ArtNews, only attested to the work's deceptive radicalism. "When you read such words as 'remorselessly and irredeemably ... egregiously ...pathetic ... a bore and a waste ... arid ... debacle ... farce' from a critic who once called Jackson Pollock 'second rate' and Willem de Kooning a 'pompier,' " Hess wrote after Hilton Kramer's review in The New York Times, "then it's probable that something importantly different has come to notice."

It had. But it was hard for many people to see. Mr. Tuttle started out making small paper cubes with geometric cutouts. Ostensible riffs on Donald Judd's heavy metal boxes, they substituted handmade delicacy and lightness for industrial weight, coyly suggesting a kind of innocence while extrapolating on art's fundamental role as language.

"Letters" followed, along with "Constructed Paintings": canvases also shaped like nonsense signs, painted in catchy, offbeat colors, the shapes not sharp-edged but quavery, after faint pencil drawings. Mr. Tuttle, in nudging Minimalism toward personal touch and private speech, was here abetted by the somewhat paradoxical examples of Agnes Martin and Barnett Newman. Poetic discretion slyly combined with grandiose aspirations.

The Whitney retrospective opens with his succeeding "Cloth Pieces," of the mid-60's, dancing across a far wall and spilling onto the floor. Exploring a no-man's land between painting and sculpture, they pick up on the same eccentric shapes as the letters. Lightly tinted, crumpled pieces of heavy fabric, hand cut and roughly hemmed, with no front or back, no up or down, made to hang on the wall or not, they also look best together rather than one at a time. Mr. Tuttle's early efforts occasionally favored metaphysics over sheer visual loveliness, although the early drawings, on which many works are based, place delicate marks just so on otherwise blank sheets of paper. They are like heavenly doodles, as ethereal as angels' breath.

Organized by Madeleine Grynsztejn for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, where its presentation was bigger and more strictly chronological, the exhibition occupies the Whitney's third floor, which is ordinarily not a congenial space but now has been given an almost domestic feel. Works are hung close together, with aptly unconventional irregularity. (Many of them will rotate in and out during the run of the show, as works did 30 years ago.) The Whitney curator is David Kiehl, who, in clear psychic sync with Mr. Tuttle, has made the exhibition into something of a homecoming - the installation affectionately recalling aspects of the 1975 show while casting more recent work in newly designed galleries that serve Mr. Tuttle's high-minded, obsessive-compulsive predilections.

Perhaps partly in reaction to the reaction against that first retrospective and in general keeping with the art world's turn from his own postminimal austerity toward 1980's extravagance, Mr. Tuttle allowed himself an increasing opulence in the late 70's. The evolution unfolds in rooms toward the back of the show. The first has Mr. Tuttle's utterly fine wire pieces from the early 70's: almost invisible pencil lines drawn on the wall; thin wires tracing the contours of the lines and springing from the walls, casting shadows that make yet more lines.

Wall assemblages from the early 80's, in an adjacent room, which seems like a world away, look baroque by comparison: twigs, blocks, thicker wire and corrugated cardboard are joined into Rube Goldbergian confections, brightly painted, divinely balanced. To these Tinkertoy devices, Mr. Tuttle added light bulbs during the late 80's. Their shimmery effect, collected in the last of the back galleries, is reminiscent of a sacristy.

How you approach such art is up to you. Purely abstract, made up of endless parts, joints and painterly marks that affect happenstance, they have no central focus, no beginning, no end, but sometimes a narrative peg. A group of palm-size drawings in faux-ornate yellow cardboard frames hang across a gallery corner (the corner and frames make a triangle), bearing gently colored marks and symbols inspired by Egypt. Watercolors, loosely brushed in frames shaped like railroad tracks, suggest Chinese paintings. Floor sculptures that resemble teepees summon up the Southwest, while those early wire pieces, making shapes from simple to ornate, are explicitly meant to allude to Archaic and Rococo art.

But the beauty of Mr. Tuttle's art is ultimately in its concentration on materials for their own sake, and the space they occupy. He regards these the way we hope to be regarded - individually, patiently. If what results is sometimes a trifle, so is life sometimes. There is nothing more difficult in art than to make work that looks easy. A shaman with waferboard and colored tissue paper, Mr. Tuttle operates far above the run of ready-made conceptualists with their throwaway aesthetics, because of the urgency and occasional melancholy he brings to even the simplest things.

It happens that the tranquil 19th-century American Luminist painter John Frederick Kensett is one of his ancestors. With Kensett, Mr. Tuttle shares a refined respect for plain material facts and a fascination with immaterial ones like light, which verges on the spiritual. A work like "20 Pearls (12)," painted on cheap pressed wood scraps cut into florid shapes, is a mélange of nature and culture, shot through with flowery pink, its central motifs thin washes of orange-gold paint that delicately shift in changing light.

Standing near "20 Pearls (12)," looking across the next two galleries in the show, you may notice how the edge of a work called "New Mexico, New York No. 14" in the far room lines up with the edge of the wall in the nearer room on which is hanging "Sand Tree 2."

"New Mexico, New York No. 14" is shaped like a droopy red envelope with a needle's eye looping across its middle. "Sand Tree 2" deploys a large, irregular green ovoid with a clutter of small wood crosses, from which issue forth broken Styrofoam chunks embedded with curling strips of red paper. The chunks skip up to the end of the wall.

So from the doorway they can meet up in your line of sight with "New Mexico, New York No. 14" - the wood crosses of one bookending the needle's eye of the other, making a fresh, third work.

It is not a coincidence. Nothing ever is in Mr. Tuttle's perfect world.

"The Art of Richard Tuttle" remains on view through Feb. 5 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street; (800) 944-8639.

Juror Summons

I laughed at my own excitement upon receiving this notice. I only ever hear disgruntled complaints on the subject, but I think it sounds rather fun! I'm very interested in all aspects of government and in understanding the various processes of democracy. I'm guessing there won't be any celebrity cases in the next month, though.

Mennonites in the News

Kaufmans found guilty of abuse
November 8, 2005
The Wichita Eagle
By Ron Sylvester

Finally, someone listened to those who lived inside the Kaufman House.

"Vindicated," one man said Monday evening, after his lawyer from the Disability Rights Center of Kansas called to tell him a federal jury had just convicted Arlan and Linda Kaufman of a 20-year conspiracy to abuse the mentally ill people entrusted to their care.

For years, authorities, health care providers and even family ignored the residents' accusations about being forced to participate in nude therapy, performing sexual acts for a video camera or mending barbed-wire fences while naked. The stories were considered schizophrenics' delusions.

"Some of them thought they would never be believed," said Rocky Nichols, director of the Disability Rights Center, speaking for the victims. "They all voiced a great sense of relief."

The Kaufmans lost their freedom immediately following Monday's reading of the verdict. Today, they will find out whether they'll lose everything else.

The former social worker and registered nurse spent Monday night in the Sedgwick County Jail, after Judge Monti Belot revoked their bail and ordered them into the custody of U.S. marshals.

This morning, prosecutors will ask jurors to take the Kaufmans' property, including the family farm, and the money collected from patients' families and Medicare.

After deliberating through most of three days, jurors issued verdicts that found both Kaufmans guilty of the same crimes for different reasons.

Jurors found Arlan Kaufman guilty of threatening his patients, restraining or hurting them to bend them to his will. The jury convicted Linda Kaufman of participating in a scheme to keep the patients compliant. She was acquitted of a minor charge of making a false writing.

In their verdicts, the jury said the Newton couple used the law to strike fear into their patients.

The Kaufmans each face 20 years or more in federal prison, from which there is no parole.

"Justice is about speaking for the voiceless," said Eric Melgren, U.S. attorney for Kansas. "I think today, that has been achieved."

No one listened to the voices of the Kaufman House residents for 20 years, as Arlan Kaufman defeated investigations by state agencies.

In a report to the state Senate, the Kansas Department of Social and Rehabilitation Services admitted that it didn't follow up on reports of abuse at the Kaufmans' two Newton group homes.

When SRS did investigate one claim in the late 1980s, Arlan Kaufman sued them -- and got $8,250. SRS settled the case out of court and was reluctant to look into further accusations.

When the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that Kaufman needed a license to operate, no one made him get one.

If not for Ryan Filson and Dan Coney, two federal Medicare fraud investigators, stories of the Kaufman House might have remained wild accusations from people who weren't often believed.

But while executing a 2001 search warrant inside the Kaufman Home, Filson and Coney found videotapes depicting what the residents described.

More than 100 hours of footage, taken by Arlan Kaufman, showed scenes of the mentally ill women with their legs spread on a kitchen table, touching themselves, allowing themselves to be groped by Arlan Kaufman. Footage showed the men and women shaving each other's pubic hair. They worked naked on the Kaufman farm near Potwin, pulling rusty nails out of boards and tearing down a barn.

The tapes went to agencies that certify social workers and nurses. But those boards lost their ability to pursue the case once they revoked the licenses.

The tapes finally went to health care fraud prosecutors for the Kansas attorney general in February 2004. They found evidence of abuse of a dependent adult, but the state's two-year statute of limitations had expired.

Attorney General Phill Kline alerted Nichols at the Disability Rights Center, which had authority under federal law. He helped get the case before federal prosecutors in Topeka and the Department of Justice's Office of Civil Rights in Washington, D.C.

"For two decades, you saw how the government is not supposed to work," Kline said in Wichita following the verdict. "In the last 22 months, you've seen how it should work."

Tanya Treadway, a health care fraud prosecutor, recognized questionable Medicare billing from the Kaufman House.

But the tapes showed more.

Lisa Krigsten and Kristy Parker, two Kansas law school graduates now prosecuting civil rights cases for the Department of Justice, charged the Kaufmans with "involuntary servitude."

The charge had been used successfully against people who illegally keep domestic help but rarely -- if ever -- against licensed health professionals.

The Kaufmans now risk losing everything.

Prosecutors will ask the jury to return nearly $300,000 billed to Medicare and the victims' families. The government will also request titles to the Newton houses and Butler County farm that the Kaufmans gave to their children 11 days after Filson and Coney searched their home.

No matter what the jury decides today, Arlan and Linda Kaufman will likely spend the rest of their lives behind bars. He is 69. She is 62.

They will await sentencing in a Leavenworth facility run under contract with the government by the Corrections Corporations of America.

Movie Recommendation

A haphazard movie choice at the library yesterday turned out to be a winner. If you're looking for a quirky story about friendship and trains, check it out:

Xtreme Art

Self-Mutilation Is the Sincerest Form of Flattery
November 6, 2005
New York Times
By Randy Kennedy

MARINA ABRAMOVIC really had her heart set on being crucified.

It was supposed to be the showstopper, maybe literally, in seven consecutive nights of often harrowing performance art that she will stage beginning Wednesday in the rotunda at the Guggenheim Museum. The crucifixion would have been a re-enactment of a near-mythical event in the canon of performance art, when the artist Chris Burden, in the spring of 1973, had his hands nailed to the roof of a Volkswagen (the "people's car") and then had the car rolled out of a Venice, Calif., garage into the daylight while the engine screamed.

In many ways Ms. Abramovic's redux would have been the perfect illustration of the strange obsession, nurtured for more than a decade, that is bringing her to the Guggenheim: "covering" famous performance art pieces, much in the way one rock band covers another's hit, adoringly but in a different voice, with new riffs and rhythms.

In music, it's a time-honored tradition. It even happens occasionally in the visual arts with artists like Richard Pettibone, who has made a career of painting teeny copies of Warhols, Duchamps and Stellas. But in the world of performance art, where transience was an integral part of some of the best-known work from the 1960's and 70's, the idea of replaying pieces as if from an orchestral score has usually been seen, if at all, as heresy.

And so when Ms. Abramovic - herself a groundbreaking performance artist - started going around seeking permission from artists or their estates, even offering to pay for the privilege of re-enacting the works, she was not always well received. She recounted going to Düsseldorf with her sights on one of Joseph Beuys's seminal pieces from 1965 - "How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare" - but his widow, Eva, "opened the door and said: 'Frau Abramovic, I got letter from Guggenheim. My answer is no ... but you can have coffee.' " " 'Mrs. Beuys, but I don't drink coffee - can I have a tea?' " Ms. Abramovic replied, as she recalled in a recent interview, grinning slyly at her attempt to draw out the conversation. (It worked; the piece will be one of the seven at the Guggenheim.)

Mr. Burden - who long ago retired from performance but in his prime was almost drowned and once shot in the arm for the sake of art - was not so agreeable. "I don't even know the reasons why - he didn't answer," said Ms. Abramovic, who planned to replace the Volkswagen with a Chaika, a kind of Russian-made limousine she remembered from her youth in Yugoslavia.

"He only had a secretary answer in a letter saying, 'Mr. Burden is not talking publicly these days, and he doesn't give permission to repeat this piece or any other pieces.' I can't tell you how disappointed I was."

She could not claim to be surprised, though. In her early days of performing in Belgrade in the 1970's, Ms. Abramovic (pronounced ah-BRAH-moe-vitch) would have agreed with him. "It was supposed to be that event, in that moment, and that was it," she said. But, along with some other artists, she began to chafe at these strictures, feeling that a video of a performance or written instructions for how a performance should be undertaken could be works of art themselves. "Plus, I am Russian," she said. "We love archives."

By the 1980's, many of the pioneering performance artists of her generation began to burn out or change gears. Mr. Burden moved on to installation pieces and sculpture. Vito Acconci - one of whose more infamous pieces Ms. Abramovic will recreate at the Guggenheim - also stopped performing. But Ms. Abramovic, while also moving into making objects and films, continued to perform grueling pieces with her longtime partner in life and art, the German artist Ulay. After their split in 1988, she returned to performing alone.

As she grew older - she will be 60 next year - she says she felt the strong need to preserve the memory of performances that influenced her as an artist. "There's nobody to keep the history straight," she said. "I felt almost, like, obliged. I felt like I have this function to do it." And this sense only grew stronger when she began to see ideas behind many important performances borrowed with no credit given, or appropriated by advertising and fashion.

During the interview, she showed a photo from a 1998 issue of Italian Vogue taken by the fashion photographer Steven Meisel, in which a naked man and woman are spinning away from each other. Then she showed a photo of an almost identical image from a 1976 performance she did with Ulay. Asked whether Mr. Meisel had sought permission or made reference to their work, she laughed.

"Reference?" she said angrily. "Are you crazy? No reference, nothing." (She said she had a lawyer contact Mr. Meisel, who responded that he was very inspired by her work; Mr. Meisel declined to comment for this article.)

In music and the visual arts, copyright protections are well established. But federal copyright laws do not extend to live performance. Choreography, for example, has had clear copyright protection since 1978, when federal laws were updated, but only as a kind of written record. The live performance of a choreographic piece cannot be copyrighted, however. And so neither can, say, the performance of a woman screaming until she loses her voice or brushing and combing her hair until her scalp bleeds - both of which Ms. Abramovic did.

"Anybody can take anything, and we can't do a thing about it," she complained. This is why she insisted on getting permission from artists whose work she wanted to recreate or reinterpret. (She will not be paid for the Guggenheim performances, she said, and according to contracts drawn up with the artists or their estates, only they are eligible for profits from a book and film that will be made in conjunction with the performances.)

In person, Ms. Abramovic does not really convey a sense of being someone willing to carve a star into her stomach with a razor blade, as she will do at the Guggenheim, restaging one her own pieces from 1975. When a visitor arrived recently at her bright, roomy SoHo loft, furnished with nice midcentury tables and chairs, Chopin was playing on the stereo. She made mint tea and put out almonds and pieces of candied ginger. She laughs often, and loudly, and sometimes seems embarrassed when talking about her more extreme work.

For a while now, she has called herself the "grandmother of performance art," but she does not look very grandmotherly, with long, dark hair and a trim figure. She recently posed for a picture in Vogue and chose to dress up like Sofia Loren, in a tight sweater. Contrary to her reputation as a dark priestess of the avant-garde she also spoke with delight - and no apparent irony - about how an episode of "Sex and the City" recreated scenes from a 2002 performance in which she fasted for 12 days while living full-time on a shelf at the Sean Kelly Gallery in Chelsea.

"It's fantastic," she said, "the popular culture absorbing me."

Despite her years of pushing her body to its extremes, Ms. Abramovic does not seem to be much the worse for it, though she does bear some scars and pulled up her shirtsleeve to show a recently acquired one, long and straight, on her left upper arm.

"In normal life, if I cut myself I cry like a baby because I'm totally emotional and vulnerable, and I don't like pain," she said. But in a performance, much as in ancient religious endurance rites, "then the pain is not an issue."

"We are afraid of dying, and we are afraid of pain, so much," she said. "I like to get rid of the fear of pain by staging the pain in front of the audience, going through this pain and showing them that it's possible. It turns into something else. Then you have this energy to do it."

Partly to prove that she is as committed to these ideas as she was in her 20's, Ms. Abramovic had wanted to include not only Mr. Burden's crucifixion piece but also a re-creation of what she considers her most radical work, called "Rhythm 0." Performed only once in Naples in 1974, its premise was terrifyingly simple: She agreed to stand in a gallery for six hours while anyone who came in could choose any of 72 objects around her - including knives, scissors, a needle, a loaded gun - and do anything they wanted to her with the objects. It was her only work in which she essentially ceded control over her body, and over the pain to be inflicted, to her audience.

The participants became involved slowly at first, but after a while Ms. Abramovic's clothes were cut off, and her body marked, burned and cut. Finally, a man took the gun and made her put it up to her head, trying to force her to squeeze the trigger. She didn't resist, but a fight ensued as other spectators intervened. "This was the only performance where I was really ready to die," she said. Trying to explain why, she repeated a well-known quotation from the artist Bruce Nauman, one of whose performance pieces will also be recreated in her show: "Art is a matter of life and death. This may be melodramatic, but it is also true."

But she will not get the chance to demonstrate that proposition at the Guggenheim, at least in so stark a fashion. She and Nancy Spector, the museum's curator of contemporary art, had long discussions about the dangers involved in the piece, about the difficulty - or near impossibility - of getting permission for the gun and about whether the piece could be staged without it.

"The risks really outweighed anything else," Ms. Spector said, "and then it really came down to the legal questions. We just couldn't find a way to have a loaded gun in the museum. And she, being who she is, could not do something halfway. She really did want to perform a work that had that level of toughness that really confronted her audience and gave them a sense of this side of her work."

There is no question, even with the exclusion of the loaded guns and nails, that Guggenheim visitors will see tougher work than they have seen on Museum Mile in a long time. Each performance will last for seven hours, adding Ms. Abramovic's own twist on performances that were originally much shorter, stretching them out into her trademark endurance tests.

In the Beuys piece, she will cover her head in honey and gold leaf, cradling a dead rabbit and whispering to it about pictures on the wall (a meditation on rationality and language - and a kind of in-joke about art scholarship). In a cover of a Gina Pane performance from 1973, she will lie on a bed above lighted candles and make cuts around her fingernails and lips while slides of women painting their nails flash on the screen. Ms. Pane's work often focused, very painfully, on the objectification of women, a theme that Ms. Abramovic will also explore in a less grueling but more revealing way in a Valie Export performance from 1969: she will stalk around a stage with a large fake gun, wearing pants with the crotch removed. In recreating the piece by Mr. Acconci, she will not be seen at all, but like Mr. Acconci when he made it famous in 1972, she will be concealed beneath the stage, masturbating and speaking suggestively through a microphone to the visitors walking near her.

"The question is whether the piece will really work with her doing it, and not him," Ms. Spector said. "We don't know. This whole thing is about asking questions as much as it is about presenting finished work. I think it's starting a discussion that a lot of us really need to have."

She added: "Of course, there's also the practical question of how she is going to do this, physically, and I'm not even sure."

Occasionally, Ms. Abramovic is not quite sure herself.

"I am so afraid of this piece," she said, "but the moment the public is there, I'll go from a lower self to a kind of higher self. I don't know how. It just happens."

Plus, for the first time, she said, she has hired a personal trainer.

"I'll be O.K.," she said, laughing. "He is good. Very tough."

Correction: Nov. 6, 2005, Sunday:

A front-page article in Arts & Leisure today about the performance artist Marina Abramovic misstates the dates when she will re-enact famous performance pieces at the Guggenheim Museum. They will be seven consecutive nights beginning this Wednesday, not next month.

You Gotta Fight for Your Right...

Two stories: the first about straight rights from the always interesting and opinionated sex columnist, Dan Savage, and the second about male rights related to procreation, from the New York Times.

"Straight Rights Update: There were two disturbing developments in the battle over straight rights last week. First, we know that Target fills its ads with dancing, multi-culti hipsters giving off a tolerant, urbanist vibe and runs hipster-heavy ad campaigns positioning Target as a slightly more expensive, more progressive alternative to Wal-Mart. Well, as John Aravosis revealed on Americablog.org last week, Target's politics are as red as their bulls-eye logo. The chain allows its pharmacists to refuse to dispense birth control and emergency contraception to female customers if the pharmacist objects on religious grounds. What's worse, the company claims that any of its employees have a right to discriminate against any of its customers provided the discrimination is motivated by an employee's religious beliefs. Read all about it at www.americablog.org and www.plannedparenthood.org.

Second, more troubling news from Tucson, Arizona, where a 20-year-old rape victim called dozens of pharmacies in town before she found one that stocked emergency contraception (EC). 'When she finally did find a pharmacy with it, she said she was told the pharmacist on duty would not dispense it because of religious and moral objections,' reported the Arizona Daily Star. Emergency contraception, the story continued, 'prevents pregnancy by stopping ovulation, fertilization, or implantation of a fertilized egg. The sooner the emergency contraception is taken after intercourse, the more effective it is.'

Don't just sit there, heteros. Defend your rights! Don't shop at Target, and write 'em and tell them why you're going elsewhere. ( Go to Target.com and click on 'contact us,' then 'Target Corporation.') As for Fry's Pharmacy in Tucson, the shop that wouldn't dispense EC to a freakin' rape victim, the fundamentalist pharmacist claims its her 'right' not to do her fucking job. Well, you have a right to free speech. Call Fry's at 520-323-2695 and ask them why the fuck a pharmacy that won't dispense EC keeps the drug in stock. Do they do it just to torment rape victims? ('Oh yeah, we've got EC—but you can't have any. Don't you know that Jesus wants you to bear your rapist's child?') Rise up, straight people, and demand your rights!"

The Right to Be a Father (or Not)
November 6, 2005
New York Times
By Pam Belluck

BOSTON — Case study one: a pregnant woman wants an abortion. Her husband doesn't. Should he have a say?

Case study two: a woman wants to become pregnant with frozen embryos. Her ex-husband opposes the decision. Should he have a say?

The answer, legally, is no in the abortion case, and in the case of frozen embryos, almost always yes.

It might seem paradoxical, but it is emblematic of the way technology is changing the landscape of human reproduction. And it is the kind of paradox that could get more attention with the nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the Supreme Court.

Since his nomination, Judge Alito's most talked-about decision so far has been his dissent in the 1991 Pennsylvania abortion case, Planned Parenthood v. Casey.

In that case, Judge Alito wanted to uphold a Pennsylvania law that required women to notify their husbands when seeking an abortion. His view was rejected by the majority of the judges, and later, by the Supreme Court, which used the case as a vehicle to uphold the legality of abortion.

The Casey decision effectively left the decision of whether to have an abortion entirely up to the woman. But in cases involving frozen embryos, judges have given equal weight to the father's point of view.

"It's fascinating because they are sort of developing on dual tracks without a whole lot of reference back and forth," said David D. Meyer, a University of Illinois law professor, about the divergent outcomes in cases involving abortion and frozen embryos.

With abortion, said Marsha Garrison, a professor at Brooklyn Law School, the courts recognize that "that embryo is in the woman's body, it's within her and can't be separated from her, so it's not just her decision-making about whether to bear a child, it's about her body."

Ms. Garrison said even if a man is tricked into impregnating a woman, many courts have held that "well, it just doesn't matter: if you engage in sexual intercourse, you assume the risk that a child will be born."

With embryos, however, everything changes, said June Carbone, a law professor at the University of Santa Clara. "There's nothing that involves her physical integrity," she said, "and there is a notion that this would be a violation of the parenthood of the father" not to take his wishes into account.

The watershed case was a 1992 decision by the Tennessee Supreme Court, which ruled that a man could prevent his ex-wife from using or donating embryos that they had created during their marriage in an attempt to have children.

IN that case, the couple had not signed a contract specifying what should be done with the leftover embryos. But some courts, including one in Massachusetts in 2000, have said that even if both parties signed a contract giving the woman the right to the embryos in case of divorce, such a contract could not be enforced. "Either parent cannot be forced to become a parent in circumstances where they object, even if they signed a contract," Professor Carbone said.

The dichotomy in the courts' treatment of abortion and embryos could change the approach of fathers' rights advocates. For years, they have argued that there is a basic unfairness in the lack of a father's input in an abortion decision. "A mother can terminate a pregnancy and the father has no say," said Michael McCormick, executive director of the American Coalition for Fathers and Children. "On the other hand, a mother's able to make a unilateral decision to keep the child and saddle the father with 18 years of child support."

But what if fathers' rights groups used the embryo issue to gain more leverage? Jeffery M. Leving, a Chicago lawyer and fathers' rights advocate, has created a print advertisement aimed at fathers in embryo cases: "Dads, protect the fate of your potential unborn children," it says.

Mr. Leving, who opposes abortion in most cases, last year led an unsuccessful attempt to get Illinois to pass a law requiring women seeking abortion to notify their husbands. "I believe that if we get newsworthy frozen embryo cases, it could bring media attention to the rights of fathers in the abortion area," he said.

While most fathers' rights groups have a right-to-life cast to them, antiabortion groups and fathers' rights advocates might find they eventually part company. In embryo cases, courts have almost always ruled that in the case of a dispute, the embryo cannot be implanted and no child will be born.

Of course, ultimately, technology could change things yet again. Fathers may end up with rights in abortion cases, Professor Garrison said, "if the day ever comes when men can become pregnant or we have artificial incubators" so that a woman's womb is unnecessary.

Memorial/Monument

This post corresponds to a topic under discussion at Gierschick Work, specifically in these two posts:

Painting=Memorial
Memorial redux

Definitions of memorial (from Google):

a recognition of meritorious service

a written statement of facts submitted in conjunction with a petition to an authority

a structure erected to commemorate persons or events
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

"Memorial" (Russian: Мемориал) is an international historical and civil rights society that operates in a number of post-USSR states with the following missions stated in its charter: *"To promote mature civil society and democracy based on the rule of law and thus to prevent a return to totalitarianism; *To assist formation of public consciousness based on the values of democracy and law, to get rid of totalitarian patterns, and to establish ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_(society)

A grave marker (monument, monolith, tombstone, headstone, footstone) memorializing a loved one. It identifies a grave or lot, also the inscription identifying a crypt or niche.
www.cemeteries.org/glossary.asp

something designed to preserve the memory of a person or an event, like a monument or a special day. The Washington Monument in Washington, DC, and Presidents Day in February are both memorials to our first president.
www.artsconnected.org/artsnetmn/spaces/vocabulary.html

[new] An early term for a *memorandum. Today it has quite a different connotation.
www.grberridge.co.uk/dict_comp_k_o.htm

Measure which makes a recommendation or expresses opinion to the president of the United States, Congress, or legislatures of other states. If drafted for consideration of both houses, it is a joint memorial. It is not used to commemorate the dead.
arcweb.sos.state.or.us/legislative/legislative%20guide/legislative%20guide/glossary.html

a statement of facts presented to a legislative body that is the basis for a petition or request for action; the way in which one organization formally makes a request of another; brought to a synodical women's organization convention by a unit or to a triennial convention by a synodical women's organization
www.womenoftheelca.org/about/glossary.html

structure or sculpture built specifically to preserve the memory of persons or events. See also Commemorative monument, Funerary sculpture
collections.ic.gc.ca/sculpture/text/glossary.html

A measure adopted by either the House or the Senate (a measure adopted by both is a joint memorial) to make a request of or express an opinion to Congress or the President of the United States, or both. It is not used to commemorate the dead. (See Concurrent Resolution)
www.osba.org/leginfo/advocacy/glossary.htm

Something that serves to honor and/or remember.
www.nps.gov/gwmp/pac/mrn/terms.html

A Religious or Secular service without a body present.
www.funeral-care.com/Default.aspx

a group of naval ships under one command or grouped for one purpose.
www.teach-nology.com/worksheets/misc/veterans/quiz/

Stone commemorating a person, May or may not be marking a grave site. Example, sea captain lost at sea; a gravestone would have been placed at the site without a body. Gravestones moved away from remains become memorials.
www.gravestonepreservation.info/glossary.asp

Definitions of monument (from Google):

memorial: a structure erected to commemorate persons or events

an important site that is marked and preserved as public property

repository: a burial vault (usually for some famous person)
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

A monument is a structure built for commemorative or symbolic reasons rather than for any overtly functional use.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument

A permanently placed survey marker such as a stone shaft sunk into the ground.
www.metesandbounds.com/survey.html

A fixed object and point established by surveyors to establish land locations.
www.zioncebu.com/glossary.html

Any kind of marker to indicate the boundary or corner of a parcel of land, used by surveyors.
www.realestateagent-listings.com/terminology/terminology_m.htm

A ground surveyed point of known x,y,z coordinates that is assumed to be correct for general mapping purposes.
www.extension.umn.edu/distribution/naturalresources/components/DD6097hr.html

Is an upright die and base together. It is also referred to as a tombstone, headstone or gravestone .
www.vermontgraniteworks.com/granit11.htm

a statue or stone structure that gives tribute to someone or something
library.thinkquest.org/5464/Glossary.html

An upright memorial, including what used to be called a tombstone, also includes large structures like obelisks, usually made from granite.
www.vintageviews.org/vv-tl/pages/Cem_Glossary.htm

any object or collection of objects that indicate the position on the ground of a survey station. In military surveys, the term monument usually refers to a stone or concrete station marker containing a special bronze plate on which the exact station point is marked
cartome.org/FM3-34/Glossary.htm

Physical evidence, either natural or manmade, which has been established as the boundary(s) for a parcel of land. Land is sometimes described by monuments which serve to identify the boundaries of the subject parcel. This method, while quite common in older descriptions in rural areas, relies on the use of both natural and artificial monuments. ...
www.rentv.com/index.cgi

An upright memorial consisting of two or more pieces, usually a base and a die. Double monument
www.cemeteries.org/glossary.asp

The physical object that indicates the location of a point, station or real property corner.
www.thematthewscompany.com/terms.html

Object or mark used by a surveyor to fix or to establish boundaries or land location.
www.azta.com/glossary.php

A fixed natural or artificial object used to establish real estate boundaries for a metes-and-bounds description.
www.co.saint-croix.wi.us/Departments/RegisterOfDeeds/definitions.htm

From the root word meaning,” to think”. A building, structure or memorial; a headstone constructed of two or more sections. Can include a wide range of types and styles.
www.gravestonepreservation.info/glossary.asp

An upright memorial, usually of granite, it is intended to mark a family lot. Centered on this lot, it displays family and/or individual names and dates.
www.toledomemorialpark.com/images/pages/terms.htm

A large pile of stones used to mark a trail or often found at the summit of a peak. See also Cairn and Duck.
www.frankstehno.com/sagemesa/guide/terms/mterms.htm

Death Row Candy

This story from NPR's Morning Edition today brought tears to my eyes. Something about the image of a man in solitary confinement in a harsh prison setting putting so much energy into covertly making candy to share with his death row friends. Sweet candy in a cement and stainless steel cell. I wish my art could be that sharp.

You can listen to the story at the top of this page, and you can see pictures, get a recipe and read more about King Wilkerson on the rest of the page.

Inspiration

I love Andy Kaufman. I think the guy was a genius at his craft. If you've never seen the movie Man on the Moon, it's a good place to start. I consider him one of my inspirations in the arts world.

Upstart Comedians Goofing on Andy
November 3, 2005
New York Times
By Peter Keepnews

As befits a city often considered the world comedy capital, the second annual New York Comedy Festival - which began Tuesday and runs through the weekend - is heavy on big names, most of them more familiar from television than the club circuit: Denis Leary, D. L. Hughley, Joy Behar, Mario Cantone, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.

As befits a city where comedians come to be discovered, it also has its share of lesser-known names, mostly performing in support of the stars.

And as befits a city where Andy Kaufman got his start, it has a grown man acting like a hyperactive boy who thinks the audience members are guests at his birthday party, as well as a woman who, explaining that she is too sick to talk, lip-syncs her act to a recording of her own voice.

Those performers, Ryan Flynn and Charlyne Yi, are among the eight finalists competing tonight at Carolines on Broadway, one of the festival's producers (the City of New York is also involved), for the Andy Kaufman Award. First presented last year, the award is for the performer who best reflects Kaufman's "originality, humor and courage" and who most forcefully "breaks the barriers of conventional stand-up comedy." The competition is both an answer to the question "Where are the new weirdos coming from?" and a sign that Kaufman, once known as an iconoclast, has become an icon.

"I was a big fan of his from the first time I saw him perform as a stand-up," said Mr. Leary, the star and creator of the acclaimed FX series "Rescue Me" who returns to his comedy roots tomorrow night at Avery Fisher Hall. "He was just so off the wall. There was always an aspect of 'Where is this going?' He was one of those people who had what I call a secret evil plan - the guy's performing, but you don't know exactly how you're supposed to react. What he did is hard to do; it takes a lot of commitment."

It's also hard to define. Kaufman was the comedian who wrestled women. Who disguised himself as an oafish lounge singer and was his own opening act. Who first attracted attention in comedy clubs by pretending to be a meek, confused soul with a vague accent who couldn't tell a joke to save his life, before suddenly morphing into a formidable Elvis imitator. Who played a range of roles, onstage and off, but never, ever broke character. He was such a master of the put-on that although he died of lung cancer 21 years ago, some Kaufman devotees are still not convinced he's really dead.

Whether he was even a comedian remains debatable; he once said that he considered himself a song-and-dance man. (Oddly, Bob Dylan said the same thing about himself.) George Shapiro, Kaufman's manager and one of the forces behind the Andy Kaufman Award, recalled an argument he had with his client: "He wanted to do a 'bombing routine,' a routine so bad that everybody walks out. He wanted to do eight minutes of terrible jokes - jokes that weren't even jokes - that would have people booing, people walking out. I said, 'You can't do that.' We negotiated. I finally persuaded him to keep it to two minutes."

Kaufman's younger brother, Michael, 54, a financial consultant and former stand-up who was the M.C. and a judge at the semifinals Tuesday night, agreed that his brother did not like being called a comedian. His explanation: "Andy saying he was not a comedian was just protecting himself, so if he didn't get a laugh he could say, 'It's not supposed to be funny.' But let's face it, he liked it when people laughed."

The official criteria for judging the contest, in fact, break things down mathematically: 60 percent based on originality and courage, 40 percent on humor. The prize is $5,000, courtesy of Stanley Kaufman, 83, Andy's father, who organized the first contest with Mr. Shapiro and Caroline Hirsch of Carolines. Both are judges, along with Susie Essman of "Curb Your Enthusiasm"; Bill Zehme, author of a Kaufman biography; and Kaufman's sister, Carol Kerman. Everyone involved emphasizes that the idea is to celebrate Kaufman's fearlessness and his anything-goes approach, rather than to find a performer with a similar act. ("It's really about finding the essence of Andy," Ms. Hirsch explained. "The wackiness, the off-the-cuff creativity. The shock value.")

Nonetheless, last year's winner, Suzanne Whang seemed more than a little Kaufmanesque. Born in Virginia to South Korean parents, she does stand-up as Sung Hee Park, a nervous Korean immigrant with limited English who has apparently learned her entire act phonetically without realizing that the jokes are racist, sexist or otherwise completely inappropriate. The resemblance to the fumbling Foreign Man character that first got Kaufman noticed - and led to his long-running role as the lovable mechanic Latka on the sitcom "Taxi" - is hard to ignore. She insists the resemblance is coincidental.

"It wasn't consciously in my mind," said Ms. Whang, an actress with a long list of movie and television credits who began showing up in comedy clubs as her alter ego about three years ago. "But every time I would perform in a club, somebody would say, 'Oh my God, it's like Andy Kaufman is back from the dead.' "

The competition is the only festival event designed specifically to showcase unknown or little-known performers. But most of the festival's headliners are doing their part to deflect at least part of the spotlight to others. Mr. Leary, for example, shares his bill with Lenny Clarke, Patrice O'Neal and others better known to comedy fans than to the general public.

"My inspiration comes from working with Rodney Dangerfield," Mr. Leary said. "He was such a nice guy to young comedians and went out of his way to give them a break. I always said that if I got to do big shows, I'd do the same thing.

"It's a nice thing, especially in New York in terms of a comedy festival, to say, 'Here's some faces you may not have seen, or you may have seen but not seen enough of.' It's more fun for me to do it that way, and it always makes the audience go home happy because they didn't know what they were getting."

The audience at the Andy Kaufman Award finals is likely to feel the same way.

The New York Comedy Festival runs through Sunday. Information: (866) NY-LAUGH or www.nycomedyfestival.com.

Guess Who's One Year Old Today?

Daisy's First Birthday

Bottle labels

While living and working in Germany, I soaked off and pressed labels from bottles I commonly encountered and enjoyed. Here are a few for you to inspect.

$3,000,000.00 for a corn field?!

I like the idea of this art piece, but I must say, this is what makes midwesterners hate artsy-fartsy people and oppose the NEA. A farmer would look at this project and see a lot of wasted money. Many would find it almost disrespectful of the profession. Only an over-educated artist could figure out how to spend $3 million on a small cornfield.

On the other hand, it is a neat project that gives people some quiet space in the middle of a chaotic city.

Putting the Culture in Agriculture
October 30, 2005
New York Times
By Erika Kinetz

Just off the Pasadena Freeway, 28 green acres of tall, tassled corn have taken root in what was once a grimy rail yard. Actually the corn is just the beginning. "Not a Cornfield," a public art piece by Lauren Bon, has drawn a number of species rarely seen in Los Angeles: butterflies, herons - and pedestrians, who stroll along the new path that encircles the field.

"You're in the middle of a cricket-filled cornfield in the center of the most urban part of downtown L.A.," said Ms. Bon. "Being inside that kind of hush is really surprising."

If the city were the sort of place to celebrate history, the cornfield would be mythic land. It is less than a mile from the original Pueblo de Los Angeles and 150 feet from the Los Angeles River. The Zanja Madre, which was once the city's main water channel, passes nearby. Italians, Chinese and Mexicans all came through the area and left their mark. "It's our historical center," said Ms. Bon.

It is also, however, temporary. The seeds were planted in July; the corn will be harvested by hand, starting today and continuing through Dec. 4. Ms. Bon estimates there are about two million ears of ornamental corn to pull down. "Need any?" she asked.

More than one Midwesterner has fled just this sort of labor, and many of them made their way to Los Angeles, where they celebrated the convenience of life with canned green beans and nonfat milk.

Ms. Bon spent her middle and high school years in Santa Monica and thought lunch was cheese and crackers that came from a package. So this project, she said, is "rooted - bad pun - in the desire to have something real, inalienable.

"This is real. You feel like you're in something real in a city that is at least largely about the creation of image."

But, of course, it is not really real. It is art (with its own Web site, notacornfield.com), paid for by a $3 million grant from the Annenberg Foundation, where Ms. Bon is a trustee. In March, the land reverts to the state parks department. Ms. Bon hopes that her project will call attention to the city's continuing transformation and rebirth.

"The piece is about one agricultural cycle," Ms. Bon said. "It's a transitional piece, which takes a brown field and leaves it a green field." She plans to turn the corn kernels into ethanol, which she would like to use to power a bus, and to turn the husks into biodegradable packaging or collapsible shelters for the homeless.

As for the area around the field, it will undergo a transformation of its own: the Capitol Milling building, just next door, is scheduled to become 45 residential lofts, as well as some retail space. "It's an amazing renaissance that's going on here," said Steve Riboli, who bought the mill in 1999. Next up, he hopes, that renaissance will attract a Whole Foods Market.

Work in progress

Study for Karlsruhe Ticket Validator
Acrylic on brown paper
350mm x 177mm
31 Oct 2005