Last week, an art student at UWS, Devin Wait, wrote to me asking to interview me about what art was. He was planning on speaking to a number of people, gathering different opinions. I asked him just to email me the questions; I’d respond to them and we could… Read full post »

In posting a response to the despair inspired by the failure of the attempt to unseat Scott Walker as governor of Wisconsin and towel boy to the Koch brothers, I suddenly thought of Petrarch.

You know, Petrarch, the guy who invented sonnets, the great humanist scholar, lover of Laura. He… Read full post »

John Stossel went on Fox news with some "shocking" video of people at a food pantry who he insists aren't really what he understands as "poor" because of the stuff they have. (He interviews blacks and immigrants with heavy accents.) Because they have cable TV and a cell phone, an air… Read full post »

Once upon time there was a piece of canvas whose destiny was to become a painting. As it was growing up with its artist, Jane Smith, they worked hard together, and the painter did her utmost to charge the painting with everything it needed to be a work of art, to… Read full post »

From a brief riff on the late Thomas Kinkade, "painter of light," whose death at 54 revealed a man very different from the PR he spread:

I don't think art should really have rankings of "quality," as in high or low quality. We should think rather of its "qualities",… Read full post »

In Thomas Friedman's April 21 NYTimes column, "Down With Everything," he writes: "Frank Fukuyama, the Stanford professor and author of “The End of History and the Last Man” . . .  has been working on a two-volume opus called 'The Origins of Political Order,' and I could detect from… Read full post »

I’m an Art Hound.  This isn’t some kind of secret society, though it is for a Minnesotan a little embarrassing.

“Art Hounds” on Minnesota Public Radio is a once-a-week program that recruits (non-radio) people who love rolling in live art to talk… Read full post »

The Osama Bin Laden killing seems both a matter for sorrow and for relief.

 I've long been an advocate of attacking the heads of oppressive and violent organizations rather than fighting them through attrition. It's just that it's good to remember that the death of… Read full post »

It’s the morning after the election—and what a morning after! Our district’s longtime representative, an honorable, hardworking, responsive legislator named Jim Oberstar, has just been voted out, apparently in a fit of voters’ pique because he has been in office “too lon… Read full post »

This is about boats, so of course it’s about desire. The beautiful forms of boats arouse the longing to have one, and to go places you couldn’t without it.

My father had this bad as a kid. In the summer of 1932 in Duluth, he talked his friends into building the… Read full post »

This is a piece I wrote a couple years ago about a strip club that had recently opened in downtown Duluth. It's closed now, but there are similar clubs around. 

Walking through the "gentlemens' club" the NorShor Experience made me think about the changes in "exotic dancing" over the… Read full post »