Top 10 Posts of 2013: You People Have Dirty Minds

Robert Boyd

What posts got lots of page views this past year? Dirty ones. It makes me want to put "NSFW" in all my post titles. To be honest, it's a little depressing. I want great posts like "Continuum's Live Art Series - Night 4 (NSFW)" to be popular because they're good, not because they have photos of peen in them. But it is what it is. Here are the 10 most popular posts of 2013 based on page views.

1) Go Get the Butter (NSFW). This was a review of Staring at the Wall: The Art of Boredom curated by Katia Zavistovski at Lawndale. What made it NSFW (and presumably popular) were the penis-based artworks by Clayton Porter.


Clayton Porter, untitled (casts of melted butter), 2012, plaster of paris

2) Continuum's Live Art Series - Night 4 (NSFW). Dean Liscum's performance art posts have been some of the most popular, partly because he is a witty and sensitive writer and partly because people seem to love naked performance artists. This one had an edge over all the others. If you go to Google Images and enter the search term "ball sack", the second image you see is Jonatan Lopez nude painting his dick blue. Click the photo, and you come to this post.


Jonathan Lopez moments before the dick painting (photo by Dean Liscum)

3) A NSFW Pan Art Fair--Dallas Memoir. So the NSFW-nature of the popular posts is starting to wear me down. In this case, it was a post about holding a one-day micro-art fair in Dallas. The NSFW part was a photo of legendary stripper Candy Barr topless (it was related to a vinyl 45 by Michael A. Morris of his granddad reading Barr's poem, "A Gentle Mind Confused"). The post was fun, and gave me a chance to reflect on two parts of Dallas--the uptight establishment part and the outlaw part--and the post got a lot of readers from Dallas. As well as a lot of readers who like boobs.


Michael A. Morris, A Gentle Mind Confused

4) POLL: Where Do You Houston Artists Live?. This is just what the title implies. I think this was popular for two reasons--people love polls, and Swamplot linked to it.

5) "I Am" Is a Vain Thought: Thomas McEvilley 1939-2013. Houston lost Bert Long, Lee Littlefield, Cleveland Turner and others this year. I'll miss Thomas McEvilley the most. This post was my attempt to summarize his thinking about art as reflected in six of the books he wrote.


Marina Abramovic, Thomas McEvilly and Ulay from Art, Love, Friendship

6) An Open Letter to Homeowners in the Memorial Villages. This post wasn't a piece of criticism--it was just an excuse to run some photos of sculpture by Meredith Jack. But somehow Swamplot picked it up and therefore it got a lot of page views.


A Meredith Jack sculpture on the lawn at AMSET

7) Big Five Oh, part 2: Frieze. My nephew Ford and I share a birthday. In 2013,  he turned 21 and I turned 50, so I decided to give him (and myself) a birthday gift of a trip to New York, where we saw a bunch of art fairs. We saw the fairs with a couple of my friends, identified by the pseudonyms LM and DC. I wrote several posts about the trip, including this lengthy post about Frieze.


LM and I discuss Gursky (photo by DC)

8) Reasons to Go the the Houston Fine Art Fair. The Houston Fine Art Fair get a lot of criticism this year, including some from me. But it also featured some interesting art, including a lot of art from Latin America, ranging from older art like the mini-exhibit of Xul Solar pieces to contemporary art like the excellent showing from the art space LOCAL in Chile.


Xul Solar, Proyecto fachada para ciudad, 1954, watercolor on paper, 25.5 x 36.6 cm

9) Picasso Black and White. What can I say? Picasso is always popular.


Pablo Picasso, Head of a Horse, Sketch for Guernica (Tête de cheval, étude pour Guernica), 1937, 65 cm x 92 cm

10) Where the Artists Are. This post was where I crunched the numbers from the respondents to the poll in the fourth most popular post above. Not only did it get a lot of pageviews, it also generated a healthy dialogue in the comments section, which I always love. The surprise in these results were the unexpected popularity of Glenbrook Valley, Eastwood and Greenspoint for artists.


A really pretty mod in Glenbrook Valley

Beyond that, Google Analytics tells me that 72% of the page views came from the U.S. (followed by the U.K., Canada, France and Germany). Houston produced 25% of the page views (followed by New York, undefined, Austin and Dallas). Most referrals (as they are called in the online world) came from Facebook, followed by Reddit, Google and Swamplot.

Thanks for reading The Great God Pan Is Dead in 2013!

POLL: Where Do You Houston Artists Live?

Robert Boyd


Where do you live?

A commenter on Swamplot made the following comment in reference to some new construction in the Third Ward:

My understanding is that it goes like this: First are usually the lower income artistic types who give the area a ‘vibe.’ Then come slightly higher income artistic types who find fixer-uppers and start increasing property values. Then come the affluent who scrape the lots to build their own houses. Finally, the developers come in to build on any remaining semi-large contiguous lots. ["Comment of the Day: Getting Ahead of the Game in the Third Ward", Swamplot, 8/28/2013]

Someone responded, "I’ve lived here [the Third Ward] for 4 years and have yet to meet a single 'artist.' Also, I’m not 'artistic' at all…I’m a square middle-aged white guy working for an oil company."

So this made me wonder--where do the artists live? I know where some Houston artists live because I've been to their homes. Of course, there is Itchy Acres, the clot of artists living up in Independence Heights.

Are you an artist? If so, please tell me in the comments where you live (just your neighborhood--I don't want your street address). If you don't want to mention where you live in public, please feel free to email me. I will keep the information private. Then once I have enough responses, I'll publish the results.

P.S. If you are willing to reveal this, would you tell me if you rent or own? (Or have some other arrangement altogether?)

P.P.S. I assumed that respondents would all be visual artists of one sort or another, but I've gotten responses from people who identify themselves as musicians and writers. So if you want to, please let us know what kind of artist you are.

Last April Links

by Robert Boyd


Art at 3210 Elmridge, Houston, TX


Who is this artist? Swamplot noticed this house for sale on HAR, where the garage had been turned into a nice studio. I love it when these realtor photos show art on the walls--it's fun to form opinions about the artistic tastes of the sellers. But in this case, these minimal geometric abstractions were presumably painted by the seller. So looking at them, Houston readers, so you have any idea who the artist might be? [HAR, "A Garage-Free Garden and Gallery Complex Near the Astrodome," Swamplot, April 30, 2012]


The art garage at 3210 Elmridge

The best review I've read all month. A review of Avengers Versus X-Men: Versus [sic], which is apparently a comic book that has no story whatsoever--just fight scenes between Iron Man and Magneto and the Thing and the Submariner, four Marvel superheroes/supervillains. It was reviewed by a guy named Tucker Stone. Here's my favorite part:

Neither of the fights are poorly drawn. However, nor are they drawn in such a way that’ll make you jump out of your seat and screech CONFOUND IT, THIS BE THE KING’S OWN ENTERTAINMENT while spitting on that picture of Jack Kirby that everybody spits on whenever they read an Avengers comic, because fuck that dead guy and his shifty family, they keep trying to steal the pajama gang movies from the big company that makes all the best presents, and they’re gonna lose anyway, because justice is for douchebags and so is trying. ["Sometimes You Just Kick Back And Watch ‘Em Drown" by Tucker Stone, The Comics Journal, April 27, 2012]

Anish Kapoor, Leviathan, 2011, P.V.C and forced air, 33.6×99.89×72.23 meters

Why is art so damn big these days? Jillian Steinhauer wrote a nice piece on the trend to super-sized art for Hyperallergic. 

The problem with art as entertainment is that it privileges the “Wow” factor over everything else. Standing inside many an Olafur Eliasson installation, you’re delighted, you’re impressed, you take a picture of yourself looking yellow. But you don’t think about it all too much. Of course there’s a chance you might, when you go home, but the art itself doesn’t encourage thinking. Rather, it privileges emotional response — particularly the feeling of being impressed and awed — over understanding; in other words, passive consumption versus active.

She equates these super-large pieces with entertainment, which makes sense. But they could also be associated with Kant's idea of the mathematical sublime--another type of sensation that shuts down thinking. ["The Problem With Big Art," Jillian Steinhauer, Hyperallergic, April 30, 2012]



Pacolli, The Revenge of the Real, 2012


This art made me laugh uncomfortably. It's by an artist named Pacolli and is currently on view at Fecal Face Gallery [sic] in San Francisco. Here's a detail:



Pacolli, The Revenge of the Real detail, 2012