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.

Dear O’Keeffe Museum: Please get over yourself. You are embarrassing the museum, the memory of the artist you claim to represent and you are embarrassing Santa Fe. Stop picking on schools, especially little ones, and focus on your actual mission.

There are two kinds of art in public places: sanctioned and unsanctioned. In the first case, an artist is probably “commissioned” to create or place a work of art in a public building, a park or some other agreed upon location. Performers that engage the public without having bothered to pay a fee, or artists who leave their mark in freehand spray paint or stencil work are, on a technical level, either disturbing the peace, assembling without a permit or practicing vandalism.

I suppose it’s unprofessional, possibly even unethical, to use a public medium like a published art review to speak directly to one’s mother, but I’ve got something to say.

Mom, you should go and check out the show at SITE Santa Fe.

Experimental Geography examines how the natural world has traditionally been perceived by both science and art and proposes the potential for a new field that encompasses both practices and then some. It is in Albuquerque during the midst of a national tour that goes through 2010 and promises to be an important exhibition for an audience much broader than artists and the art curiou

Victoria Sambunaris grids, maps and plumbs the thread of human response and interaction to environment with a scale and measure appropriate for people and mountians both.