THIS PAST SUMMER, I GOT A CALL from the coordinator of a national adult educational travel organization, inviting me to give a lecture to a group of retirees on the cultural history of the Twin Cities. They’d gotten my name from someone at the Walker, and of course I agreed immediately; like anyone, I could use whatever extra income comes my way. So, on a warm night in July, I arrived at a hotel…

AFTER LAST YEAR’S BUST AT BRIDGE FAIR, one of Art Basel Miami’s satellite fairs where I showed, I had no intention of going back to a swampland where speculators on unheard-ofs had sunk in the mire. The gallery I went with in 2008 wasn’t going, nor was anyone I knew. Sitting on the couch, watching reruns of Dexter (the friendly serial killer, set in Miami), all seemed lost — and that was fine; I was safe…

COMEDY IS NO LAUGHING MATTER for Joseph Scrimshaw and his wife, Sara Stevenson Scrimshaw. The ambitious duo, who just celebrated their third wedding anniversary in November, recently founded a theatrical and creative services company called Joking Envelope, LLC, an endeavor devoted entirely to producing, according to the website, “comedic works including live theater, independent film, and corporate…

THIS WEEKEND, THE SECOND ANNUAL DANCE FILM PROJECT, presented by Cinema Revolution Society, screens at Intermedia Arts. The “second annual” anything is cause for celebration in the arts, but the Dance Film Project is especially exciting, both for the promise of dance film as a genre and for its natural fit with the lively dance and independent film scenes here in the Twin Cities. First, a definition…

IN THE OCTOBER ISSUE OF WIRED, in a section celebrating “12 Shocking Ideas That Could Change the World,” Gregg Easterbrook argues in favor of human cloning. “Nature wants us to pass on our genes; if cloning assists in that effort, nature would not be offended,” he writes. Besides, clones already exist in human reproduction: they’re called identical twins, Easterbrook continues. Every child, regardless of…

LET ME BEGIN BY SAYING THAT I ENJOYED The Louvre and the Masterpiece exhibition, now on view at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Filled with an assortment of jaw-dropping works of art, the show is dazzling, especially for fans of Johannes Vermeer, lost-wax cast sculpture, and archaic ceramics. It’s also important to note that museum attendance is down across the country and that, now more than ever…

THE NOTION OF AUTHENTICITY, IN ART AND LIFE, tends to remain as elusive as it is intermittently urgent. In the Heights, a 2008 Broadway hit translated into a touring production appearing at the Orpheum, concerns itself with a corner in New York’s Washington Heights neighborhood and the residents whose roots are placed there. In its charming, circuitous way, it weighs heavily in favor of embracing one…

LET ME START BY SAYING that if you’re interested in Choreographers’ Evening 2009 (curated by Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad, aka BodyCartography), you’ve got to check out the Walker blog: What follows is the considered opinion of one critic, but what’s going on over there is the real on-the-ground struggle. Read up and dig in. But before you do, let me just make a point about taste. Why are we so…

THE WORK OF AMERICAN ARTIST DAN GRAHAM IS SO INTELLECTUALLY PERIPATETIC and playful, so insouciant and incisive,  diverse in media and in execution, one hardly knows where to begin in writing about the retrospective, Dan Graham: Beyond, currently at the Walker Art Center. So, how about taking a cue from the work itself? In particular, let’s start with the pavilions and structures one is invited to walk…