“Postcards from Nowhere,” which appears in this week’s New Repub­lic, is Jed Perl’s latest poison-​tipped volley against the ruling elite of con­tem­po­rary art. Some sample copy:

For Matthew Barney, Richard Prince, and now Cai Guo-​Qiang, having a ret­ro­spec­tive at the Guggen­heim is like being a Visig­oth who has been given the keys to Rome. At the Guggen­heim, the staff no longer curates exhi­bi­tions. They simply invite an artist to come in and rape the place.

And, dis­cussing the Broad Con­tem­po­rary Art Museum and the New Museum:

Dis­cussing such muse­ums in archi­tec­tural terms is like dis­cussing a sculp­ture by Jeff Koons in com­po­si­tional terms. You would be kid­ding your­self. These muse­ums are only brands designed to con­tain brands.

I’ve been struck favor­ably by some of the art that Perl hates. Whichever of Damien Hirst’s mir­rored med­i­cine cab­i­nets was hang­ing in the Palazzo Grassi in Venice back in 2006 was impres­sive enough to steal my breath for more than a few seconds.

But far and away the best things at the Grassi were the very uncon­tem­po­rary Rothkos hang­ing in a second-​story alcove. And so, having found myself almost com­pletely bored by the Whit­ney Bien­nial a few weeks back–only Leslie Hewitt’s lean­ing paint­ings held my atten­tion for more than a few min­utes there–I have to count myself gen­er­ally sym­pa­thetic to Perl’s spite.

That said, I thought it inter­est­ing to see how dif­fi­cult Perl found it to explain what exactly it was that gets under his skin about the Matthew Bar­neys and Richard Princes of the world.

Enchanted by this little mys­tery over at John Latta’s Isola di Rifiuti, I set myself to poking around Google Books, which coughed up this page and its delight­ful list of the “key words and phrases” in Ken­neth Koch’s Selected Poems 1950-1982:

sleep­ing with women, circus girls, Thes­mopho­ri­azusae, Poros, asleep and sleep­ing, Frank O’Hara, O’Ryan, Saint Ursula, Fer­nand Leger, Jane Freilicher, Art of Love, John Ash­bery, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, lim­burger cheese, Amba, poetry, brassiere, Larry Rivers, Strangler

No, kids, it’s not flarf; it’s just a little fun.

The Chico Enterprise-​Record has a pretty amaz­ing slideshow of the Hum­boldt Fire, which lasted from June 11 to June 16. Accord­ing to the paper,

Flames from the Hum­boldt Fire chewed through 23,344 acres, destroyed 74 homes, and dam­aged 20 others before it was brought under full con­tain­ment Monday [June 16] just after 6 p.m. Progress against the fire allowed the release of sev­eral crews Sunday and Monday, reduc­ing the number of per­son­nel on the fire lines from a high of 2,500 Friday to around 1,000 today [June 17].

And on a more depress­ing note, the Times also has an arti­cle today on a new report (PDF) that describes how the U.S. gov­ern­ment blocked the dis­burse­ment of loans intended to fund clean-​water and san­i­ta­tion projects in Haiti for polit­i­cal reasons.

The rev­e­la­tion of the role the Amer­i­can gov­ern­ment played in keep­ing the loan money from reach­ing Haiti is the most dis­turb­ing part of the report–though given our his­tory in that coun­try it would be dif­fi­cult to describe the news as shock­ing–and I’ll get to it in a moment.

But the report’s real effort–and arguably its most impor­tant–is to con­strue this med­dling as a human rights vio­la­tion. Specif­i­cally, the report con­cludes that “it is clear that actions taken by the United States in block­ing IDB devel­op­ment loans ear­marked for water projects in Haiti were a direct vio­la­tion of the U.S. government’s human rights obligations.”

The key con­cep­tual hinge for this argu­ment, which seems fairly novel to me as a legal argu­ment (but what do I know?) is that

the human rights of indi­vid­u­als in many parts of the world—including the right to water—are directly affected by the actions that some States take at the inter­na­tional level through inter­na­tional orga­ni­za­tions, devel­op­ment pro­grams and, most impor­tantly for this report, IFIs [inter­na­tional finan­cial institutions]” (p. 50).

This opens the path to the report’s con­clu­sion that

the United States actively impeded the Hait­ian State’s abil­ity to ful­fill the Hait­ian people’s human right to water through its actions, thus breach­ing its duty to respect human rights. Such bla­tant frus­tra­tion of the object and pur­pose of the human rights treaties to which the United States is a sig­na­tory or a State party is a clear vio­la­tion of inter­na­tional law.

In any case, here are the para­graphs that describe the U.S. government’s inter­fer­ence with the Hait­ian loans, from pages 11 and 12 of the report, which was jointly authored by the Center for Human Rights and Global Jus­tice (CHRGJ), Part­ners In Health (PIH), the Robert F. Kennedy Memo­r­ial Center (RFK Center), and Zanmi Lasante: