"Yawn, and then some. Will we never be rid of the snobby blight of the Bloomsberries?"

Terry Teachout, bemoaning the "2 entire walls... devoted to Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant" at the "Inventing Abstraction" show at the MoMa.

One of the many things triumphantly demonstrated by "Inventing Abstraction" is the sheer volume of second- and third-rate art... that was generated by the rise of the abstractionists. The imitability of so many key figures of the movement never ceases to fascinate me.

If I were in NYC today, I would scamper over to see the big show before it closes. But I'm here in Madison, Wisconsin, where the corresponding spectacle is "1934: A New Deal for Artists" at the Chazen Museum. Here's the museum's propaganda:

During the Great Depression, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised a “new deal for the American people,” initiating government programs to foster economic recovery. Realizing that Americans needed not only employment but also the inspiration art could provide, the administration created the Public Works of Art Project, the first federal program to support the arts. Although short-lived, the PWAP employed thousands of artists to paint regional, recognizable subjects—from portraits to cityscapes and street scenes to landscapes and rural life. These artworks were displayed in schools, libraries, post offices, museums, and government buildings, vividly capturing the realities and ideals of the era. 1934: A New Deal for Artists celebrates the 75th anniversary of the PWAP, presenting 56 vibrant paintings from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s unparalleled collection.

"Vividly" and "vibrant" are words. So are "dully" and "dreary." The one painting you can see at the link is far better than nearly everything else in the show, and I can only imagine the looks of the thousands of other paintings that were cranked out in this government jobs program and foisted on the schoolkids and library-goers of America. I moved quickly from one painting to the next, and — unfortunately or fortunately — I was alone, because much cynical mockery went unsaid.

I realize only now that I could have worn my iPhone with its headset and a recording app running and muttered my lines as if talking to someone by phone. Would that be wrong?

What would you prefer to have inflicted on you in the form of way too many paintings — New York City's snobbish adoration of the Bloombury Group or Madison, Wisconsin's politically medicinal devotion to FDR?

Tilda Swinton takes a nap — the artwork.

At NYC's Museum of Modern Art — if you go at the right time — you can look at Tilda Swinton in a glass box, purportedly sleeping. It's called "The Maybe." If you've ever wanted to go right up to a celebrity and gape and her, this is your chance.

An integral part of The Maybe's incarnation at MoMA in 2013 is that there is no published schedule for its appearance, no artist's statement released, no no museum statement beyond this brief context, no public profile or image issued. Those who find it chance upon it for themselves, live and in real—shared—time: now we see it, now we don't.

Presumably, "no no" is a typo. I love the way the celebrity's need to control her own time/sanity is — by the usual museum-bullshit text — deployed to give depth and mystery to the art.

I think it's a great opportunity to observe everyone other than her, as they relate to a celebrity and to a work of art in a museum.

Will they get right up close? Will they display the attitudes of politeness/deference that are ordinarily used around a stranger/sleeping person or will they get that ponderous studiousness that people summon up when they are looking at art?

If I were Tilda, I'd have some confederates in the crowd to get right up to the glass and point at my body parts and say provocative things. Press your nose against the glass right by my face. Huff some breath on the glass and write words in it. Have someone dressed as a guard come over and enter into a dialogue that begins as a simple don't-touch admonishment and spirals slowly into a My-Dinner-With-Andre-type inquiry about what is art.

"An ancient marble sculpture of the god Pan (a part-human, part-goat figure) having sex with a she-goat is not to be segregated..."

"... as it has been since its discovery in 1752, but displayed openly with the other exhibits – a liberal move by London, if also one which dulls the object's impact. Getting this story into the news ensures that centuries of censorship are not swept under the carpet, and that Pan, and the show he speaks for, remain 'hot property.'"

Say what you will about porn and censorship through the ages, I just want to observe that it's not bestiality to have sex with a goat when you are a goat.

Roman Empire-era stones, long thought to be gaming pieces, turn out to be ass-wipers.

Or that's the new theory in the British Medical Journal. It's not as if there's ancient poop on them. They've just decided to present them differently. Instead of hey, kids, the Romans played checkers, it's hey, kids, can you imagine wiping yourself with a rock. And the kids all go EEEWWW!!! which the adults take as a sign of gratitude for the trip to the Fishbourne Roman Palace museum in West Sussex, England.

The museum curator,  Dr. Rob Symmons, said: "I love the idea we've had these in the museum for 50 years being largely ignored and now they are suddenly engaging items you can relate to."

I wonder what other museum labels could be tweaked to pique the imagination of the younger generation.

"They would have probably been quite scratchy to use and I doubt they would be as comfortable as using toilet (paper)," Symmons said. "But in the Roman era it was that or very little else."

Like the Romans were cavemen! From Bill Bryson's wonderful book "At Home: A Short History of Private Life":

The Romans were particularly attached to the combining of evacuation and conversation. Their public latrines generally had twenty seats or more in intimate proximity, and people used them as unselfconsciously as modern people ride a bus. (To answer an inevitable question, a channel of water ran across the floor in front of each row of seats; users dipped sponges attached to sticks into the water for purposes of wiping.) 

Maybe the stones were for taking a first pass, and the sponging followed. But let's not picture this dry scraping. The Romans had water galore. They were up to their asses in water. Bryson writes:

The Romans loved water altogether—one house at Pompeii had thirty taps—and their network of aqueducts provided their principal cities with a superabundance of fresh water. The delivery rate to Rome worked out at an intensely lavish three hundred gallons per head per day, seven or eight times more than the average Roman needs today.

I'm going to posit that the Romans would find our reliance on paper pathetic and Symmons's sniffing untoward.