In Manhattan, where growth is profound, density is high, and regulation is light, the value of properties adjacent to parks have grown at a more rapid clip than comparable properties not adjacent to parks. Parks help property values grow. A good recent study is the Hudson River Park (click through for a PDF for analysis). But look also at the recently restored Bryant Park—where adjacent office properties are substantially higher than throughout the rest of midtown Manhattan.

David Alpert complains that in the absence of regulation to require them to do so, developers in the (monstrously named) NoMa neighborhood have no incentive to build amenities like parks. His argument concedes the point that parks are not valuable, worthwhile investments for the developers. Ryan Avent gets hung up on the point about amenities being a virtue for virtue's sake. He says that amenities are not the same as public goods and that if parks were so valuable, private actors would build parks.

But in the case of NoMa, the city missed an investment opportunity. Zoning and investing in a park is a risk that could have paid out in the form of higher property taxes for properties adjacent to the park. There's no incentive for the city to subsidize higher property values near the park, but if a park spurs development and draws people who then pay sales taxes at the soulless NoMa shopping district near the NewYoFlo Metro station, then there is a way to value that investment. The park's maintenance should be paid for by a Garden Improvement District comprising those properties who benefit from the park.

Now, it may be the case that the District's artificially sparse urban corridors do not in fact give rise to parks that increase the value of their neighbors. Or perhaps the return on investment in parks is low compared to that seen in other cities, including Brooklyn (Prospect Park), Portland (McCall Park), Minneapolis (Loring Park), San Antonio (the River Walk) and other cities. It would be a risk for D.C.

Fortunately, parks are mistakes that are easily corrected. Were the District to invest in some parcel in NoMa and adjacent property taxes did not rise to cover the costs for creating the park, then the District could simply auction the land. This might be a wise idea even in the face of success: In 1993, when the city government put 22 public-park/community-garden properties in the rising Loisaida/Alphabet City neighborhood up for sale, the Trust for Public Land purchased them. The city won coming and going.

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.

Wreck has been this guy in my life now for just about 10 years, nearly all my 20s, and I am his steward. Wreck has a heart murmur (he has always had a heart murmur) and increasingly our visits to the vet are visits I dread. The vet is wonderful and careful, everything you hope for, and she doesn't tell me anything that I don't know, and she explains to me (in a sotto voce way) that it is best for things to be, that surgery is expensive but moreover needless. Not pointless, but needless. It is this rational unfolding that I dread the most: It's all perfectly alright that his heart murmur grows worse and that things will be as they are.

I mean, this guy. I feel a something toward him tonight I guess because tonight he is confused, and I can't seem to do anything to help him shake it. My best friend for so long. Oh, I dread the day when I describe him to someone who has never had the excellent fortune to see him be all goofy, or annihilate crabs, or feel comforted by him while heartbroken. No more new friends for me.

Eric Fischl spoke recently at a symposium hosted by the Phillips Collection and, while I wasn't able to attend, through the magic of live streaming I kept my eye on it while I was at work. There wasn't enough of a local angle for me to report on it and I pitched it to late to Artforum to put it on their calendar so, anyway, you don't care about why but I did not end up writing about it. Which is too bad—it was chock full of panels about culture and its role in diplomacy and how often do you find Sen. John Kerry and Eric Fischl speaking at the same venue?

What I caught was maddening—specifically, Fischl's presentation. His attitude toward the image and its physical construction was both elite and frustratingly common. (Nope—pno immediate application to diplomacy. If I had to guess, the moderator asked an open-ended question, and Fischl responded to it, as all artists respond to open-ended questions, with a free-form Heideggerian rap on the "what is art?" question.)

I didn't take notes on what he said, but in essence Fischl believes that a viewer can only learn about an artwork by seeing it in person. Now, this raises on one hand a lot of thorny epistemological concerns about how you know that you're seeing an artwork: Does it make a difference if it's on a crowded Metro platform or in a quiet museum, what if the lights are low or too bright, what if you are sick that day, whatever whatever.

But putting those considerations aside, in my lived experience I know Fischl to be wrong. I learned about art at Borders Books and Music. In high school, having no money to speak of and nothing at all to do, I parked my ass in either the tiny poetry corner or the tiny art and photography corner and learned—to the limit of my ability and station and as far as Borders managers' patience would allow—about art history. It was awesome and informed my later experiences. (I didn't discover libraries until college.)

Today it reminds me of one of Fra Angelico's innovations, the sacra conversazione. In this fresco Fra Angelico did away with the hierarchical presentation of the saints that until then dominated this sort of painting (Virgin Mother, Christ Child, and guests). In part that owed to the discovery of linear perspective and the prominence of architecture in the early Quattrocento (see, for example, and really for the best example, Masaccio's Trinity). But it certainly represented a humanization of figures that previously congregated in a sort of celestial promenade around the Holy Fam. Fra Angelico didn't labor over the metaphysics of the representation of God. He brought the holy figures home.

A gazillion years later we are still debating the metaphysics of seeing and representation, and that's fine and good, but let's not let that debate at the margin interfere with the teaching of art in the main. To say that a viewer only learns about art by seeing it is to restrict the available audience to the tiny clerical class who is able to afford the immense costs associated with Art Basel Miami Beach, or, hell, getting into MoMA.

In fact you can learn a great deal from models. I "understood" Julie Mehretu's work before I ever saw it and I probably gained that knowledge from a 500-px width image. Deal with it. I would guess that art education is actually hindered by the lack of a comprehensive Google Image Search or its equivalent. There is no good way to use the tools at our disposal to process art and kids who no longer idly browse the shelves at Borders don't have a better contemporary alternative.

(Sorry to beat up on old Eric Fischl and not represent his whole argument. I apologize for making him a bit of a strawman here but I do not think I am mischaracterizing his comments.)

It's quite apparent to me that it is Google's job to build an online catalogue raisonné for every artist who has ever made artworks. So I'm frustrated that I am not browsing a comprehensive collection of the frescoes of Fra Angelico right this minute. But further I'm baffled that Google isn't even working on it. To my knowledge there is no "artist:Fra+Angelico" search tool in the works to bring me the slides that I otherwise need to find through Amazon or, God forbid, an art school library.

Do I have to look to Bing? Is the problem copyrights? I'm sick of Google Image Search not turning up the image I need but further I'm tired of not having a Google Artist Search. It should be simple, insofar as it is a minor task relative to compiling every book ever written, ever. Just stick the pictures in the cloud already!

Back when I first moved to the District I would go by the art libraries of schools who didn't know me from Adam and bother them into letting me check out slide trays. Back then, anyway, it was an important part of my diet: memorizing slides by artist, by period, by genre. (Today I'm totally lazy.) In any event, it was a needlessly complicated and time-consuming way to go about finding the images I want.

So where is Google Artist Search already?

The New Criterion used to be the publication that made it unsafe to like painting. For a time—for a long time, I think—under the wing of former New York Times art critic Hilton Kramer, TNC served as a destination for effusive and unambiguously ideological criticism in praise of painting. I loved it. Some of the old flavor still persists: See Karen Wilkin's writings on Cézanne over the last decade if you're able (her reviews are behind the firewall, regrettably). I loved it: For an enthusiastic admirer of painting who never subscribed to the painting-is-dead notion, I was sympathetic to the urgency of their agenda. But I also felt the strong urge to temper my enthusiasm—for TNC if not for the priority of painting they supported—because their reviews were informed by an utter disdain for contemporary media. (Installation art and so forth).

Threading that needle was great exercise. How can I convey that my appreciation for Childe Hassam does not come at the expense of my affection for George Condo (or for his protege, Kanye West)? Once, if I recall correctly, a New Critter wrote a favorable gloss of my review on the Turner retrospective at the National Gallery of Art. Now, I'm proud of that review. But reading their commiseration with its points, their suggestion of solidarity with me as a critic defending the classical ramparts against all the site-specific Saracens and video-art Visigoths made me feel gross. I like all that new stuff!

This is a roundabout way to say that I miss the TNC that did not, for example, even pause after Harold Pinter's death to condemn the man, his politics, his sympathetic obituaries, and all of the theatre world for indulging him. "I ought not to speak about the dead because the dead are all over the place," Pinter once said. "[I]nstead of being called out for his political autism and his acquiescence in atrocity, he will be awarded the Nobel Prize," said TNC.

Roger Kimball has turned TNC into a high-brow Tea Party rag—but enough preamble. Here is James Bowman from earlier this week, writing about the "culture of honor" in the media that shielded President Kennedy's indiscretions:

As more women were admitted to the group, the honor culture of the media was diluted and ultimately disappeared. I have some sympathy for the view that this is a good thing — at least insofar as I think female journalists are a good thing — though I don’t quite share it.

Does Bowman think it is a good thing there are female journalists? His byline is a long lament for the lost culture of honor, so I would guess the answer is "no," insofar as he thinks women cost the professional world its honor, which is actually his explicit opinion. Sad thing. TNC was at one time the place to read the untimely but passionate defense of Spenser against the longstanding perfidy of blank verse. Bowman might as well be writing about Mad Men.

No show has ever had me so eager to get at it as the "AbExNY: The Big Picture" show at MoMA and, while I don't want to say I was disappointed, you-the-reader have read enough to know that this is exactly what I am going to say, so, indulge me in a series of caveats, a minor bid to raise your own anticipation, before I come clean with it.

In the first place, "disappointed" doesn't exactly do justice to this survey. The incredible works from the Abstract Expressionist era represented in MoMA's collection resist that sort of entreaty from mere mortals. Viewers don't get to be disappointed in the Ab-Ex that MoMA can muster. Nobody can do this survey better than MoMA and yet, well.

"Big Picture" is a just survey of the Abstract Expressionist period, despite the survey's several outstanding flaws, including specifically the omission of Clyfford Still (ably examined by Tyler Green) and the inclusion of Philip Guston, whose flirtations with Ab-Ex brush stroke, while quite handsome, are no more important to Guston's career or Abstract Expressionism's development than Guston's Works Progress Administration paintings say much about the WPA. You could say that the abstractions that precede Guston's mature, comic style illustrate the ubiquity of Ab-Ex language in painting at the time. You could, but MoMA does not.

Then there is the overestimation of the era's forefather (Gorky), winners (Pollock and Rothko; Motherwell, Newman, Reinhardt), and also-rans (Still, Gottlieb, all the women). The exhibit is hung to reinforce the hierarchical presentation of Abstract Expressionism that anyone who has taken a college-level survey of modern art knows by heart. This is an installation of the museum's permanent collection and not an argument, looking back, about the things that MoMA and the rest of us missed about the period. Certain constraints built into the show foreclose the possibility of a real re-examination: It's Ab-Ex from New York that MoMA happened to have acquired, so it is of course rule bound to a certain extent to reinforce the prevailing mythology of Abstract Expressionism—Albert Barr being, after all, one of its foremost curatorial oracles.

Yet there are glimpses throughout of the college art history course that might have been: Lee Krasner's Untitled (1949) is one of the gems of MoMA's Ab-Ex collection, and of the era period—and yet it is not one of the gems of this show, or not put forward as one, anyway. So it's not wrong that Gorky devised a visual vocabulary that Pollock and Rothko would elevate to great heights, but it goes unexamined by MoMA the degree to which MoMA itself made this a reality. Fifty or sixty years later, MoMA is still giving viewers the official line.

In hindsight it is easy to quibble with MoMA's installation but hard to argue with it. The rooms devoted to Newman, Reinhardt, and Motherwell would speak for themselves. But here is the chief disappointment of "The Big Picture": They do not. Man but is it a hard show to get into.

From the start is the awkward greatest-hits gallery adjacent to the Ab-Ex exhibit, where MoMA has crowded seminal Warhol and Jasper Johns paintings. What a meaningless, meaningful jumble of paintings that is. My working theory is that MoMA hung the gallery as a honey trap or a release valve, some way to collect and concentrate tourists preening for iPhone pictures. Something to give "The Big Picture" a little bit of breathing room.

Because Abstract Expressionist paintings are supposed to be transportive, to be "intimate and human," as Rothko put it in 1951, back when he felt the need to defend his instinct to paint very large pictures—right? Yet MoMA lets the air out of every single one. For reasons I couldn't totally appreciate or even detect until I'd left the exhibit, the new MoMA is just too clinical to withstand a look the works that made the museum. This is the exhibit that shows MoMA at its core, pride and prejudices alike, but it's also the show that reveals the failure of the new museum.

My friend kvn won't own up to it, but I have reason to suspect he is the wit behind Fuck Yeah Menswear. This fellow's website mines the dense magnetic core of Mary HK Choi's world. Click on it and you will be instaboned.

I keep fashion and design notes at Svpply. Look at this shoe! I'm not going to not own that shoe.

For another hour or so, my profile of Philippa Hughes still has the cover of the Washington City Paper. Parvenu or art doyenne? Pick up the story and consider. For extended reading, Jeffry Cudlin has some commentary on his website, and Hughes herself facebooked this xkcd comic in response.

Given what happened to the other guy who tried to mess with her this week, I think I got off easy.

UPDATE: Here is something I wrote about Hughes back in 2007, which seems so long ago.

• They said it was impossible. They said the fix was in in Charm City. They said no way, no how, could an artist from Washington take his act up the Parkway and win the Sondheim Prize right there in Baltimore. But you know what? It looks like no one told Ryan Hackett.
• Last summer I blew out a different tire three different times driving a rental truck from Dallas to Brooklyn to help a friend move—and that experience feels like winning a new car compared to artists Mia Feuer and Trevor Young's experience with a Penske rental (and the Secret Service).

Just as soon as the lab coats corroborate from my urine sample what a boring life I lead, I will begin a job with the NBC affiliate here in Washington. They'll have me reporting, blogging, editing video, and writing TV scripts. Jim Vance will come to all my parties and I'll sit right next to Lindsay Czarniak. This much, anyway, I've pledged to weird friends who grew up around here.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I choose to view the significant distance between my home and office (read: faaar, like <-- [ this much ] -->, seriously) as a positive thing. It turns out that the office is not too far from a Rock Creek Park bike trail entrance and is fairly close to a branch of the gym of which I'm a member. Despite the mounting heat and the certifiable Maryland drivers who descend upon our city during the day, my best option for work appears to be commuting to the gym by bicycle, showering up, and then riding the rest of the short distance to the office. Will the Washington Sports Club desk give me a dirty look for paying to use only the shower in the morning?

That's quite enough change for me, but still a little more is in the works. One: I'm moving out of the beloved and beleaguered Flophouse where I've spent the last three years and more of my life. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness cooking in our tiny kitchen. Those guys have been gone for so long now that I feel like a lingering ghost. As much as I enjoy the company of the people who make it home with me to the present day, next month I will haunt it no longer. Not in this lifetime, anyway.

In another turn that is both two steps forward and one step back (in time, I mean), I'm back to reporting and reviewing the local art scene for the Washington City Paper. This is exciting to me: No one else affords art in D.C. the attention it deserves. And I'll still be filing reviews at Artforum, Art Papers, Art in America and some of the other shores where my byline washes up.

And here! Writing here! I really miss blogging and feel that the blogosphere is underrepresented by local voices reporting on what Kriston Capps is doing and thinking. I happen to have some expertise in this realm.

. . . um, that . . .

oh hell. I can't think straight. Y'all know what day it is here at G.p headquarters. It is time to THROW THEM HORNS UP. Just as soon as I get a couple calls back from Los Angeles I am on my way to the first of several six-packs of Shiner Bock. Here is the day's mandatory reading. I am also enjoying this and this right now. And for your further consideration.

Some of those links courtesy of the cast of villains I call my friends back home. We're all pretty much in agreement: The more yards Colt has running and the higher the scores go, the better our chances will be. Ingram? That's some kind of Scientology thing, right?

TEXAS!

FIGHT!

I'm grateful so many people showed. Greg Allen attended and wrote a faithful account that you should read. Some of what he says kind of rankles me, but yeah, that's how that panel went.

In retrospect I have to wonder whether the kerfuffle truly follows from the power of the Washington Post or rather from the idiosyncratic personalities of the District's art community. If Jane Black had written her survey of new food on 14th Street with a negative slant—if she'd described it as, or reported it to be, an "island of misfit toys"—would food bloggers and restaurateurs have organized in upset? I don't know. But I know that many of the 138 people who showed for the art panel have deep ties in this city. This scene, sucky or scrappy, weathered a lot before money came to Northwest and Obama brought news crews. It has an attitude.

Blah blah, sunsets and storms, and then this catches my attention (via @cmonstah):

Marie Lorenz, Capsize, 2009

It's a seven-minute video by artist Marie Lorenz, recorded as she swims back to shore in Ostia (in Rome) after being shipwrecked. It's enthralling. Something about the project—she has the presence of mind to stick her camera in her mouth as she escapes from her damaged boat; somehow "project" isn't the right word here—reminds me of Bruce Nauman's Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage), a resemblance that is confirmed by the jarring flash of hands near the end. Don't miss it; read the whole thing; digg and RT.