shark week

• Morley Safer’s feature on the contemporary art world for 60 Minutes last night was 13 minutes of boring but we’ll probably talk about it anyway. In the meantime, Jerry Saltz has already penned more than 700 words on the subject. [NYMag]
• Martin Gayford visits the Tate and concludes that Damien Hirst hasn’t had a good new idea in 20 years. Are there any living critics who like the bulk of what he’s made in his career? [Bloomberg]
• Certainly not Adrian Searle, who says it’s impossible to strip away the repetition in Hirst’s body of work. Nothing compares to the cows head and flies he made back in 1990, except perhaps “the large, sealed double vitrine from the following year, containing a desk, chair, ashtray and packet of cigarettes (The Acquired Inability to Escape), but even this has the feel of an extrapolation rather than a development.” Ouch. [The Guardian]
• John Yau’s been writing some really great stuff over at Hyperallergic. This weekend he talks about Sylvia Plimack-Mangold ascribing to her paintings a “conceptual complexity… that critics often deny is possible in all painting, as if somehow painting is all just a matter of hand and eye coordination, with no thinking.” [Hyperallergic]
• Closed Systems: Generative Art and Abstraction. Set aside a bit of time to read this. It requires more head space than a lot of the bloggy chatter out there. [Marius Watz]
• Kat Kinsman shares a horrific story of torment she endured in junior high on account of her big nose. Many years later, art school cures her woes. [CNN]

IMAGE: Syliva Plimack-Mangold, “Exact and Diminishing” (1976), acrylic on canvas, 30 x 72 inches