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My friend Rachel Detrinis wrote me an email recently to let me know that Prospect 2, the much awaited sequel to Dan Cameron's first post-Katrina biennial in New Orleans, has been postponed until 2011 due to sluggish fundraising during 09. Cameron said the money raising was not going much better this year. I am sorry to hear this not only because New Orleans continues to need cultural sparks to enliven the post-Katrina economics of that great city, but because Dan Cameron's biennial was so good and so fresh that it held a standard for others to meet. Meantime tonight marks the appearance of the Yes Men at a fundraiser for Santa Fe Art Institute. Guillermo Gomez-Pena mentions them in my interview with him and Roberto Sifuentes posted today on the site. We continue to welcome comment and contribution on the intersections between politics, performance, and culture.

Tania Bruguera the Cuban-born Chicago performance artist papered the walls of an installation tunnel with used tea bags at her current retrospective at Neuberger Museum of Art, Anderson Hill Road, Purchase, NY. These are my old haunts. I used to ride my bicycle from my house to the museum designed by Philip Johnson, Westchester county's first real contemporary art destination museum, that opened in 1974. Marina Abramovic whose last major media moment involved her living, fasting, sleeping, pissing, showering, in Sean Kelly Gallery (on view to all comers) for 10 days, will soon have a performance retrospective, "The Artist Is Present," at MoMa. While typically these shows require the pundits to tag, the Artnews cover line I happened on yesterday while drinking mountain sage chai at the Teahouse on Canyon Road was, "the Feminist Evolution. " When the Whitney Biennial oepns in New York next week, we have the usual litmus test of how well the girlz are doing in the art world, judging by participation numbers. I count 55 artists in there of whom 18 for sure are women, possibly 20 (some names I did not know). Would that we could really evolve this conversation into something more than a chart. And begin to pay attention to what "evolution" means, when generally the revolutions in the art world or in the global marketplace are followed, as the last few weeks have been, by sighs of relief at auction that masterpieces of the 20th century (including, now, the late New York expat, Don Judd), continue to haul in millions.

I admit that I am overdue in writing about the new series of one-person shows at Site Santa Fe. I am also overdue in sweeping the walk, cleaning up snow, preparing for taxes. And watching the Olympics. But yesterday in Albuquerque I encountered Wolfman aka Gary, or the other way around. He assured me that things are going to settle down a little bit this week. I sure hope so. 

TED (the conference) began today in Long Beach. With the subtitle What the World Needs Now,?tomorrow Feb. 10 begins the speakers' sessions titled economically, Mindshift, Discovery (cancer researchers and a "spider silk scientist"), Action (Sheryl Crow and chef activist Jamie Oliver) , Reason, Provocation (Valerie Plame and Stewart Brand are on that one), Invention and Breakthrough, followed on Feb. 12 by Boldness, Imagination (Temple Grandin), Play, and on Feb. 13, by Simplicity and Wisdom. All that for $995. Just kidding. I can't afford it. But eventually the talks will go up on ted.com and maybe we'll all learn something we didn't know from David Byrne and Eve Ensler. No offense to TED but the artists in this list are hardly among the most cutting-edge these days, and no offense to David Byrne, Sheryl Crow, or Eve Ensler, but is innovation selling out to celebrity? James Cameron is going to weigh in on wisdom. You'll have to tell me all about it.

Coming up this week  I'm looking forward to writing about the one-person shows at SITE Santa Fe, and hosting a story on the museums of the 21st century, designs spotlighted at Museum of New Mexico. Man Ray opened at the University (of New Mexico )Art Museum last Friday, so we'll be aiming to tell you about that too. It comes with a speaker's series that tracks the connections between Man Ray and African art. As the snow continues relentless in our little corner of paradise or the high country, it can seem that TV is still the mechanism by which to most quickly see what's going on in the world. But what to make of it all? is a question that used to fall under the category of media literacy. It might not be the day to confess that I'm more of a baseball than football fan, but doesn't everybody in part watch the Superbowl for the commercials? Okay, okay.

Today Saturday finds me working, possibly because tomorrow is Superbowl and even though the word is you can find the commercials on Hulu.com, I have to be tuned in real time. I've been reading a lot lately about hyperlocal news websites and digital media. It seems like everybody who has been holding their breath through the recession (is it through?) now has decided that the new and future subject is, well, precisely what we're trying to do here: build new communities of likeminded culturati who think the continental divide is not a dead zone beyond which no art travels. Okay, so much for pontificating. There is a boatload of mud outside. My mare Molly Bloom and my dog Rose Basset Hound and I today navigated a lot of it. Important to mix the physical with the mental. Later we'll eat dinner with friends and continue talking allegory (maybe). Or at least what else is in store with the Mormon soap opera tomorrow night on Big Love.

Sundance is over. The groundhogs are split on how much more winter (argh). And the media news continues fast and furious to come in. First, last week, Steve Jobs, looking (sadly) a little bit haggard, was there for the unveiling of the IPad. Despite the fact that no one mentioned that IPad just isn't as great a name as IPod or IPhone, I continue to be a loyal Apple-ist and am continually impressed that two guys in a garage essentially made a brand (and a brand that begins with the letter i) that has turned the world around. I can say for sure no one got so worked up when Kindle was announced. As to what it all means, well, it means you can get on a list. It means that, along with news today on mediabistro that Time Inc. and Smithsonian have now partnered for major ad sales (corporate), the major magazine publishers including Time Inc., Hearst, Meredith, Conde Nast, and I'm probably missing somebody, are all putting virtual heads together to come up with a new display mechanism for how magazines  like Sports Illustrated and Vogue will appear on the IPad or Kindle. Meantime we remain fixed in our belief that indie media can also find a solid niche. Maybe it was last week's extreme snow or just David's extreme tirelessness but we feel our Sundance coverage here is among the best and hope you'll check it out.

Albuquerque, Los Angeles, Shreveport (La.), New York and Austin rank, in that order, the top five cities to be an indie filmmaker in a new report issued by moviemaker magazine. Funny thing. Up late at night every night last week I was musing about the creative class this and the creative cities that and came across an earlier moviemaker mag poll in  which Abq. was five. I need to know more about this and will be trying to learn. How do moviemakers put Shreveport ahead of Austin? Who knew? Is this a conspiracy of the Duplass brothers? Who probably have nothing to do with Shreveport or Austin (or Albuquerque), but do indeed make funny movies, of which Cyrus, for Fox Searchlight, is this year's addition to their corpus which also includes The Puffy Chair and Baghead. I was meant to be at Sundance but heck I stayed in Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Over the weekend I caught a performance that was part of the Revolutions Theater Festival. It was sadly not very good. More on that later too. And lest a book be judged by its cover or a website by its ignominous tendencies to pontificate while insomniac, well, I lost my train. Goodnight.

I hope a few of you noted the elegant Julianne Moore seated with director and fashionisto about Santa Fe Tom Ford at last night's Golden Globes. To our week, Sundance Film Festival begins Thursday in Park City, Utah. David D'Arcy is there. The late New York-Santa Fe opera patron, Robert L.B. Tobin, donated his tremendous theater collection to the McNay in his hometown of San Antonio which celebrates with a new wing for all things theatrical. A year ago tomorrow we were collectively glued to TV or stamping in the frigid air of Washington for the inauguration of President Barack Obama. During this weekend, a year later, I had several intense conversations with artists and other friends who have expressed disappointment in where things are politically. Some consensus appears to be emerging that we must ask the president to do more to support cultural life and the arts. In the spirit of new creative collectives and how much more there is to talk about than how bad were the dresses and speeches at the Golden Globes, we are slated tomorrow to hear the state of the state address in New Mexico and you'll be hearing more from us about how culture plays in politics this year, and if not, how we can all make some noise about it.

National Endowment for the Arts chairman Rocco Landesman reported Wednesday night on the NewsHour that when the $787 billion stimulus package was enacted there was $50 million in there for the arts. Even that teentsy sum met with opposition, Landesman said, from one U.S. congressman who opposed it to the effect that the stimulus should be spending on things that create “real” jobs, like road building. Must we go over this territory again and again?, as appears to be the the fashion of undervaluing arts. The US. with its $160 million  in annual arts funding delivered to arts companies and artists by the NEA, compares poorly, said Landesman, even to the lowest spender on the arts in Europe that is Great Britain (consider country sizes in these comparisons as well), that spends $900 million annually. France spends $2.3 billion. When finally the numbers are culled out and  a message arrived at one could conclude that the undervalued arts in this country are really still seen by our Puritanical rooted fellow citizens and lawmakers as some form of self-indulgence (please!) rather than as the economic driver and foundation of civic life that they are. Landesman remarked that artists are entrepreneurs, individual small businesses that contribute year in year out tirelessly, without remark, even as entrepreneurship is said to represent the American can-do spirit in some of the most challenging economics since the Great Depression. If all this gets you down consider that we are forming a fledgling community here, on this Website and in all the places creative life thrives, around the cultural polity of life in the West. Forming community is a matter of participating even though we recognize that it remains an uphill battle to convince those in power that those who think for themselves, who reflect the actual freedoms of democracy, should be granted even the minimal respect accorded to roadbuilders. And p.s. to the congressman, many of those roads are traveled by people seeking to go places where they choose to encounter the arts.