Do work!

It's bad practice to use one's blog to offer up ex ante defenses of one's print stuff, so we may say that newly minted blogger and fellow CP writer Jeffry Cudlin wandered into a trap of his own devising with this post—his, like, third or forth ever. It's tempting to write those caveats: what the reader doesn't know is that I originally wrote this, or, I would've liked to mention so-and-so's work but had no room. (Those almost always apply.) But those would've, could've, should've, and did, in fact furthermores amount to asterisks—footnotes to which the readers of the original print edition may not be privy.

To that end, I'm wagging the finger at Regina Hackett—or rather, at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Hackett first apologizes for an awkward lede. That's a feeling that strikes like a nicotine fit—second-guessing is habit forming. It's a position of privilege to write about art—and it's deflating to feel that your craft hasn't risen to the occasion. It's the correction that Hackett publishes in her post that rankles. At the end of the day, this probably belongs under the editor's column, but that's neither here nor there—if the mistake was published in the paper, the correction belongs there, right? (And apologies to RH for making her work a case in point. Here's a post that shows her off).

Skipping over the moronic anonymous comments, the conversation at Cudlin's place turns toward that favorite fulmination: whether writers must be artists to be critics. As a writer with some college-level fine arts training, I say that critics need standards like a fish needs a bicycle. The readership will out. If you don't know what you're talking about, readers who do will let you and everyone else know—that's the call and response of journalism. Blogs, I think, make the marketplace of ideas even more transparent. The charge that so-and-so shouldn't be writing about art is levied more often than not in hopes of declaring an opinion ineligible.

Now that I've covered shots across the bow, middling grousing, and navel gazing—let me tell you, I'm a real prince today—I'll direct your attention to this incredible Guardian report about a merger ventured Britain and France during the 1950s. To make one kingdom. I know. It's so rad.