FotoWeek Wrap

David Allemand and Christophe Sidamon-Pesson, Snowy Owl (Bubo scandiacus), 2010. Via Der Spiegel.

Over at TBD, Maura Judkis wrote a nice chin-scratcher on FotoWeek and its discontents. I wrote a response, complete with my prescription for making FotoWeek better for all parties involved, for Arts Desk. In short, my issue with FotoWeek is that it tries to be the wrong festival—a big, distributed, city-wide branded multi-tier event to draw attention to existing venues, when it should be a focused, condensed experience that draws photographs and works from the spokes to the hub.

Another FotoWeek post: my review of the immaculate "Faculty Choice" show at the Corcoran College of Art + Design. Be sure to check out Blake Gopnik's reviews and writeups over at the Washington Post. It's enough to make you wish that every week was FotoWeek. In one sense, it might as well be: I don't remember seeing anything at Hamiltonian Gallery to indicate that the gallery was participating in FotoWeek or that Elena Volkova's exhibit was in some specific dimension a FotoWeek show.

Finally I also did some back-of-the-envelope math on the President-appointed deficit reduction commission's recommendation that the Smithsonian Institution charge ticket fees at the door. More on this to come.