A very well-groomed woman sits silently behind the desk at Susan Inglett gallery in Chelsea, with a large glass box on a shelf above her head. The box is empty except for a giant lead double dildo, lying on its side like a barely contained animal.

We may as well say that this is Rosalind Krauss's dildo.

Here's the story: In 1974, when the artist Lynda Benglis knew she was getting a review in Artforum, she bought a centerfold ad. It cost her about $3,000. In the centerfold, she pictured herself—now famously—naked except for sunglasses, her body oiled, sporting an enormous dildo (or at least one visible end of a double dildo, that is).

It was part of a game of one-upsmanship she was playing with fellow artist Robert Morris, according to an exhibition at Susan Inglett this summer. Morris had produced a poster image of himself flexing his biceps and wearing S&M gear; Benglis had made other images provocatively using her body as a putative advertisement for her art, too (both at right).

But while Morris's poster hadn't made a ripple, Benglis's ad in Artforum exploded as soon as it hit in the November issue. A man walked into the Philadelphia Museum of Art and hurled one of Benglis's sculptures on display to the floor in protest.

At Artforum, five editors—most prominently Krauss, one of the most respected historians of late 20th-century art—got very, very pissed. They wrote and published in the next issue a letter denouncing Benglis's centerfold, calling it "an object of extreme vulgarity"—not the first in the magazine's history, but "it represents a qualitative leap in that genre, brutalizing ourselves and, we think, our readers."

Krauss and another editor resigned, split off from Artforum to create October, an exceedingly somber and dense quarterly still in print today that, in its first issue, promised to be "plain of aspect" (check) and to "restore (to criticism)...an intellectual autonomy seriously undermined by emphasis on extensive reviewing and lavish illustration" (check, but to what end? Only academics read October these days).

When curator and art historian Robert Storr visited Seattle last year, he accused Krauss of having been a hypocrite for letting Morris's ad pass but flying into a rage over Benglis's.

“Ros didn’t mind when Bob put in a photo of himself all buffed up, because she was living with him and she liked his work, but that a beautiful woman would be sassy enough to show up him at his own game…”

Back to our dildo—it's a work of art Benglis made in the summer of 1974, one in an edition of five casts of a work she made earlier in 1974 called Smile. That work preceded the Artforum episode, but the edition of five was too perfect: Benglis quickly realized that she wanted each one of the already created casts to refer to each of the five offended Artforum editors. Each is made in a different metal (bronze, tin, aluminum, lead, and gold plate); Benglis hasn't said which metal corresponds to whom. So we may as well say that lead is for Krauss—hence, Rosalind Krauss's dildo.

The rest of the exhibition, called Lynda Benglis / Robert Morris: 1973-1974, is made up of the ads by Morris and Benglis, a few sculptures, and videos, and, best of all, letters sent to Artforum in response to the dildo ad. New York magazine has a few choice responses listed here, and here's another one of my favorites:

"I am not a prude, but this is not even 'Erotica,' it is 'Dirty-ca.'" —Art dealer, Israel

What's most amazing about the responses is that several of them came from middle-school and high-school principals: Middle schools were subscribing to Artforum???? There's even a local angle: The head librarian of Mercer Island High School wrote a letter in typical polite Seattle style, inquiring delicately about whether this was merely a "bad error in judgment"?

The artist Elizabeth Murray called the editors' response "fascistic." (I'm inclined to agree with her, minus the hyperbole; like Richard Meyer, I've always been drawn to the ad.) Dorothy Sieberling, writing a piece called "The New Sexual Frankness: Goodbye to Hearts and Flowers" in New York (a caption described the ad as a "bisexual shocker"), explained, "One person's hell may be another person's health." And from the New York Times report at the time: "'What it turns out to be in practice,' John Coplans, the editor of Artforum, said, 'is that the California intellectuals say the advertisement is a woman expressing herself. In New York, the intellectuals are more Victorian."

Two of Benglis's pieces are at Seattle Art Museum in Target Practice: Painting Under Attack, 1949-78, a gaudy, glittery knot hanging on the wall (above left, titled Chi), and a dried puddle of poured paint on the floor. She was originally scheduled to be here to talk about the show last week, but had to cancel, and the museum is still trying to pin her down for a visit. Maybe we'll hear more about this, or simply more about where the dynamic artist's head is today, if she does visit (no luck yet, according to SAM).

Anyone in New York this summer, don't miss the show.

Could it possibly be better weather for it?

Alice Wheeler, for one, is at Greg Kucera Gallery. Go.

Among the highlights of the art I saw last week in New York was this show at EXIT Art—I can't forget the video Belongings by the artist Wura-Natasha Ogunji (a still is at left; click here and then on "Belongings" to see the entire thing). But even better than the show itself, after going out to dinner with our group (the 24 writers from the International Arts Journalism Institute), I had the chance to sit down and listen as three writers—Giovanni Mosquera from Colombia, Bongani Madondo from South Africa, and Greg Tate from New York—gave their takes on the concept of Negritude from three continents. Mosquera promises to publish the entire exchange, and when he does, I'll link it. (I'm told that Sartre, oddly, is the one to read if you want to best understand Negritude.)

Those are the kinds of conversations I was privy to, and I imagine they opened my mind in ways I can't yet describe. I was lucky to be part of this institute. I also want to give a shout out to Kriston Capps in D.C.—you should already be reading Grammar Police—who is working on a piece (follow-up to this) on a bizarre and fascinating case involving Iranian art and artifacts, American courtrooms, and lots and lots and lots of money. Those are the only two pieces I'm already looking forward to, but the truth is, I'll probably be reading and linking a lot more to these writers in the coming days. I met some amazing people. (One of my new favorite writers who should have been an old favorite: Gaile Robinson at the Fort Worth Star-T.)

So I'm just back in Seattle today, feeling nostalgic in all directions. I've missed this place, and I'm missing the other Washington this morning, too. When I get this way it's time to look at some art, so at 2:30 I'll meet curator Michael Darling at SAM to take a walk around this new show, which I want to love. The Baldessari at right is part of it. (Click to enlarge!)

I also just got a call from SAM spokeswoman Nicole Griffith, and apparently SAM is involved in repatriating an object to an aboriginal culture in Australia. More on that to come.

Just punching in.

I'm pretty sure that one in the middle is, you know.

From the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore.

I told you this happens at the National Gallery of Art, among other places. I came upon this woman randomly the other day at the NGA.

The Baltimore Museum of Art has the best Matisse collection in the country. It's called the Cone Collection, and it has The Blue Nude and The Large Reclining Nude—two serious hits of art history—in a single room. The other rooms are pretty much just as good. It's a killer.

What I loved was a little image next to the Large Reclining Nude

that demonstrates the phases it went through. Click to enlarge.

This is Joseph Cornell's handwritten account of a dream he had about Marcel Duchamp, from 1968. In the dream, Cornell told Duchamp that Delacroix was visiting New York City, but Duchamp didn't believe him. Cornell then said that Delacroix was putting up at a Parisian hotel, and at that point, Duchamp believed—and decided he wanted to get one of Delacroix's handkerchiefs from him.

Cornell's diary entry is part of a surprisingly rich temporary exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery called Inventing Marcel Duchamp: The Dynamics of Portraiture. It's up until August 2 and includes more than 100 portraits of the infamous chess player, cross-dresser, and readymade-maker, both by the artist and by other artists, from the early American modernist painter Florine Stettheimer to Warhol, who made a Screen Test of Duchamp shown here on video. Most of Warhol's test subjects were still, or uncomfortable, but Duchamp winks, smokes, smiles, drinks a glass of water, and seems to relate to people offscreen. He owns the joint.

The old favorites are all here (Rrose Selavy, the Monte Carlo soap horns, Baroness Elsa's feather sculpture of Marcel, Duchamp's Wanted posters, the Man Ray and Alfred Stieglitz portraits, the double exposures, Jean Crotti's wire cartoon, Brian O'Doherty's actual cardiogram of Duchamp's heartbeat).

Two new favorites: David Hammons's The Holy Bible: Old Testament, from 2002, a finely bound readymade holy book: a reprinting of Arturo Schwarz's catalog raisonné of Duchamp's works. And Frederick Kiesler's 1947 eight-part pencil drawing of Duchamp from life. The artist is wearing a tie but no shirt. His head is huge, his feet small. Each body part is drawn on its own paper, and together, they are all mounted in a large wooden frame about the dimensions of Duchamp's Large Glass. (I wish MoMA, which owns it, had an image up.)

The legend goes like this.

On Easter Day in 1916, the artist Marcel Duchamp—the man who invented the readymade (or is "invented" the right word?)—gave his friend Walter Arensberg a ball of nautical twine and asked Arensberg to insert an object into the center of the ball. Duchamp asked Arensberg not to tell him what was in the center of his own artwork. He sandwiched the ball between two brass plates held together by four screws, and titled the sculpture With Hidden Noise because when you shake it, the secret contents make a rattling sound.

Duchamp's sculpture is a surrealist exercise in collaboration and symbolism, but it's also a critique of the author's role in creating art. There is always something at the heart of the work, Duchamp insists, that even the artist doesn't know and certainly doesn't control.

According to lore, Arensberg didn't die with the secret. He passed it on to another one of Duchamp's friends, Walter Hopps.

But Hopps died in 2005, and (because I am a total nerd) I've been dying to know: Did Hopps spill the beans before his death? Is there somebody out there now who knows what's inside that ball of twine?

The other day I asked Adelina Vlas, assistant curator of modern and contemporary art at Philadelphia Museum of Art, which owns With Hidden Noise. (An artist's proof is at LACMA, made in 1964, 10 years after Arensberg died, presumably with the collaboration of Hopps.)

"Hopps didn't tell anyone," Vlas told me, "or if he did, that person didn't come forward. Conservators go into the work, and they do know. But curators aren't told the secret. We can't know."

The legend lives.

Last week I came across D.C. native Ian Whitmore's work at G Fine Art. He reminded me of this painterly painter, who is impossible not to love unless you're dead. Their Seattle counterpart? This fine fellow.

Great early review of Whitmore's work by my fellow instituter, Kriston Capps, here.

This is a painting at the National Portrait Gallery, intended to honor the founder of the Special Olympics. It had an unveiling and everything. The artist, David Lenz, portrays the founder, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, along with SO participants, including Lenz's son.

But does anybody else see the problem here?

THIS painting?

What, the people of the "differently abled" community don't have enough trouble without a retarded painting representing them? This is TERRIBLE!

Saw this the other day at the Baltimore Museum of Art. As if it weren't enough, it's called Flaming American (Swim-Champ). I love you, Marsden Hartley. Dated 1939-40.

In the last 10 days, I've become obsessed with borders. I finally have a chance to tell you about it. Yesterday (when I'm writing this) was the first free day at the International Arts Journalism Institute in Visual Arts in Washington, D.C., which I've been doing since June 10.

So far our group of 24 writers (12 domestic, 12 international) has traveled across D.C. and to Philadelphia and Baltimore; tomorrow we go to New York. We've seen show after show, and heard speaker after speaker. But the most important moments have happened in our private conversations, and when we've written about what we've seen, then talked about the writings in small groups.

A young Egyptian woman writing about Duchamp's peep-show masterwork, which we saw at the Philadelphia Museum of Art—this was my second time seeing it and it remains, to paraphrase Jasper Johns, the weirdest thing in any museum anywhere—is fascinating, let me tell you. Amira hated it. Deeply. Angrily. Other writers have gone right for the jugular of their experiences here, expressing in eloquent writing (in their second or third or fourth languages) their double bind—they're both grateful to this institute, and yet they can't help but find themselves in the belly of the beast they've been grappling with for years: the American culture, American power, American wealth, Americanness.

One of the defining conditions of being American is the ability to forget borders entirely if we really want to, to pretend they don't exist in the world because we don't need to use them. The U.S. is huge; something like only 18 percent of Americans have passports. But this condition of geography has bred a state of mind, too, right? Enter Frederic Edwin Church's painting Niagara (pictured above), which we visited last week at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. The painting is roughly the size of the top of a coffin for a very big man: 3 1/2 feet by 7 1/2 feet. Its size is large, but not huge. But people love it because its view seems to go on forever in all directions.

There are no figures in the painting—except you, looking, positioned near the edge of the falls, already in the water already and about to go over the edge. The falls have no visible bottom, just mist, as if you could fall for all time. You could rise for all time, too, into the opening in the clouds above the mist. And water stretches to both far edges of the canvas.

This landscape has no limit. Audiences went crazy for it when it was painted in 1857. The reason why was immediately understood: "It is a view of Niagara Falls which will cause all others ever painted to be forgotten," a reviewer wrote in the New York newspaper The Courier and Enquirer when the painting was first shown. "We know of no American landscape which unites as this does the merits of composition and treatment… The picture has no foreground, to speak literally. It is water to the base line, and water everywhere."

Looking at the painting now, it's easy to say that it's a historical artifact, like many Hudson River School paintings, representing the bygone era of Manifest Destiny. But it might also be possible to see it as an American dream that still endures: the dream of a world of pure potential and endless possibility, a place that is vast, self-enclosed, and without state-imposed borders. In Church's fantasy, America and the world are one seamless place without end—or, more cynically, the United States is so big that the rest of the world does not even need to exist.

Fiber Arctic: Because embroidery doesn't have to be warm.

Up until July 9 here.

Slog Tipper Rob in Baltimore points out this website, which has time-lapse video of various spots in Japan. The website apparently has something to do with a clothing retailer, but there are no advertisements in the photography, making it pretty nice to just stare at and zone out for a while.

And Slog tipper Tim introduced me to the Tilt Shift Maker, in which you can turn your photos into tilt-shift style photographs. Of course, a tilt-shift photo maker is kind of a weird thing to do with non-professional photos because most tilt-shift photos are taken from very far away, and people who just dick around with photography generally don't take those far-off landscape-style shots. All of which goes to say: If you're not careful, your photos will just look blurry. As a potential example: To the left is a photo of a deer I took on Orcas Island a couple years ago, and below is a photo from the 2007 Zombie Walk in Fremont:

During last year's Strangercrombie auction, I wrote about Marie Gagnon, a painter who keeps working regardless of whether people are watching. The other day I noticed these on her blog. They're called The School Yard and The School Yard 3.

I know a little about Gagnon, so I know she was the odd queer kid out on the school yard, standing apart not by choice at all, leaning in to appeal for acceptance or at least understanding. I like the red strip in the white, and the way it links to the red rectangle that's part of the group—there always was that one nice popular kid, the one that was nice when nobody was looking, the one you had something in common with.

And then there were the times when leaning in meant fighting back.

Have you spent any time lately considering the fact that this holds the title as Seattle's favorite painting?

It's Alexander Max Koester's Moulting Ducks (circa 1900), in the permanent collection at the Frye.

I saw it for the first time this past weekend. I don't know anything about its design (beyond that it eventually involved I.M. Pei), but for future reference: When I go, I want company.

JFK's grave is mossy, lit by fire, and he's surrounded by his family.

A photographer watching people watching other people have sex at night in a Japanese park in the 1970s.

Here's the whole story.

At Greg Kucera Gallery. (Because there's a lot of good work up at GK right now, that's why.)

Around the other side of the Katzen Arts Center in D.C., where I arrived yesterday, is this 2006 Jules Olitski, which looks like this artist and this artist made a baby, and then this artist ate its insides. I had no idea this is what Olitski was up to before he died in 2007. Here's his web site, where there's not much other work like this, either.

Gotta love John Waters. Here's his Farrah from 2000. (Click to enlarge.)

At Greg Kucera Gallery.

Remember good times, Dan?

This here is the sculpture sitting outside my dorm-room window at American University in D.C., where I'm going to be spending the next couple of weeks It's on the lawn of the Katzen Arts Center, which is next door, and where I have to be shortly for an NEA reception (Rocco, come crash! We journalists want to meet you!). I Googled, I searched the Katzen's site (is it me or is it them?), I went outside and traipsed around in the D.C. humidity even, and I could find no label for this sculpture, which may or may not be related to the piece next to it (is it by this artist? this artist? this Seattle artist? actually, I know it's not by that Seattle artist). Does this make me a dummy? Entirely possible. I got up very early this morning. In any case, here is this slightly hairy-looking lattice flattened donut, and the little steel curve-wave-whale-fin in the grass across from it.