It is on the vast voids of the American West and the aesthetics and implications of distance and long-haul shipping that artists Shelby Shadwell and David Jones have set their sights.

David Kapp may hope to be called the new Diebenkorn, but that would imply that Diebenkorn had been replaced, and the long memory of art history doesn’t always work that way.

A few months ago, I was working with a woman who was employed by a hotel chain. Her job title was ‘interior designer,’ which meant she was responsible for picking and purchasing everything from lamps and bedspreads to the “art” that I was screwing to the walls.

Zeitguised, a duo based in London, created “Peripetics,” a short video of CGI vignettes that was so odd I had to watch it twice.

On the first day of my first photography class, my teacher laid some ground rules: “no cemeteries and no homeless people.”

In one fell swoop every idea I had was voided.

It is widely agreed the human race is in grave danger. For many of us, destruction is a foregone conclusion. Be it sudden incineration via nuclear explosion, the slow asphyxiation of our ecosystem that follows the crushing impact of an errant comet, the infestation of for-profit schools or socialized medicine, make no mistake, you are in constant mortal peril and each day you survive is a little gift.

My dutiful acquiescence to a conservative and clichéd role of the artist as hermetic intellectual is thrown into sharp relief as I look back over my notes detailing the colorful and frenetic mayhem that covered all six surfaces of the Meow Wolf exhibition space—a realization that simultaneously provokes an inward chuckle and also makes me feel very, very square.

In its promotional literature, Art Santa Fe refers to the “champagne-tinged, high stakes [art] world” and promises the “ultimate arts and culture experience.” Since I was not offered so much as a cigarette, you’ll forgive me if I say that I have been to events that were more ultimate.

Photographer Brad Bealmear got a gig the first day he set foot in New York City in 1983, and wound up spending most of his career as a commercial photographer there. By some divine stroke of luck, he happened into a Fifth Avenue jewelry store just after the previous commercial photographer had been fired.

When Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic for the New York Times, addressed a sell-out crowd on Friday July 24, as this year’s speaker for the ART Santa Fe Presents series, he was a bit patronizing, but was so friendly about it that no one cared.