"They don't even keep it up," a woman said after visiting the Olympic Sculpture Park. "Somebody dumped a washer and dryer there!" Whiting Tennis, folks: trompeing l'oeil.
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"I know this is hateful of me," Eric Fredericksen wrote in The Stranger in 1994 after Kurt Cobain survived an overdose in Rome, "but I was glad largely because what I mostly wish for the tortured artist figures of my time is for them to age ungracefully, not burn out but fade away." But after Fredericksen sent students in his University of Washington art class to Seattle Art Museum's Kurt exhibition and they couldn't relate, Fredericksen realized "it was possible, it turns out, to do both."
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"I don't know how comfortable you'll be nude, especially from behind," Cornish grad Mark Velasquez tells Peregrine, who was raised in a San Francisco hippie commune, in a preview of next week's Bravo reality show Work of Art.
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"The fight never stops," killer Vietnam-era-and-beyond artist Nancy Spero said in the documentary Our City Dreams, which screened at the Henry Art Gallery. "There are different battles to be fought, and you really can't sit back. You can't just sit back in a rocking chair."
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"If the premise that good contemporary art prepares the world for what is to come holds true, then artists can share their uncanny sense to feel the times and places in which we live," says the PR propaganda for MadArt in the Park. Starting Sunday, artists including Jason Puccinelli, Justin Lytle, and Casey Curran come into Cal Anderson Park to make temporary installations.
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"I've been finding—or fabricating—a sense of grandeur from inside the house," Isaac Layman said of his large composite photos of household objects at Lawrimore Project. It brought to mind Matt Browning's comments about his own small, fragile sculptures at the gallery last month: "The attempt to do anything major now in a world full of major shit going down just seemed idiotic and really egotistical."
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"Lawrimore Project's current location is rumored to be closing" and "Western Bridge likewise ends in 2012," Jessica Powers wrote at ArtSlant.com, to be replaced by, in her opinion, "more alternative and nomadic or artist-operated spaces." She's not mourning: "Institutions... refuse to give up a once vibrant and now stagnant dream."
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"If you need to bring a bureau, so be it," said artist Susan Robb, before embarking on The Long Walk, in which 50 people spent three days and two nights walking 35-plus miles from Seattle to Snoqualmie Falls, followed by a van containing all manner of goods people saw fit to bring for the "open source" event. 
