The headline in New York Times, reporting the death of Andrew Wyeth at the age of 91, said he was both ‘revered and ridiculed.' That's a fitting phrase to use, not because it's true, but because it was clearly the way Wyeth wanted it.

IFO (Arrival), the big (six by nine feet) 2004  Scott Davis painting often on view at the Portland Museum of Art, is a difficult one and takes some getting used to.

What a number - 970! Nearly a thousand entries for a juried show in Portland, Maine. It staggers the imagination, but much of the art world of the twenty-first century is indeed boggling.

Bob Solotaire was a fixture in art in Maine for many years. He was a very good artist and good guy to have around. He was quirky and odd, but in a good way. I first met him in Portland in the late 1970's and was struck by the coherence of his landscapes, particularly the industrial constructions like views of the cement plant in Thomaston.

The fact that the South Portland tank project was done using mass calls for artists and jury selection from hundreds of entries mark it as a provincial undertaking. In the real world, great projects aren’t done that way. Juries and mass calls are done by local arts organizations and percent-for-art projects.

Here’s the way grownups do it: You get someone who really has deep knowledge of the field, tell them the proposed budget and ask them to name some artists who could do it.

A responder to a previous post questioned my criteria for making distinctions between good art and bad. Many gallons of ink have been consumed on this topic, much of it by people a whole lot smarter than me, but it’s worth considering anyway.

This is not a matter of taste. For instance, my own preference is for abstract art, but one of the best contemporary painters I know about is Lois Dodd, a landscape painter.

Paul wrote that my argument that made a direct comparison from art to newspapers, and by extension if we couldn’t have good newspapers we shouldn’t bother to have any. The function of newspapers is to provided information for civic life. A bad newspaper is probably better than no newspaper at all, although we may find that out soon anyway, for reasons unrelated to my argument about art.

It’s an article of faith among art organizations that public art is unquestionably a good thing. The fact is, most public art is far from a good thing; most of it is plain awful.

Making art good enough to hold its own in a pubic space is special skill, and most artists, even very good artists, can’t do it. Even if they could, most committees, and Portland’s is no exception, can’t make a decision for quality art, even if they were offered it.

It’s in the nature of newspaper scheduling that you don’t always get to write about those interesting events, so I haven’t had the time or column inches to devote to a veteran painter of considerable interest, Charles DuBack at Jameson Gallery in Portland. His show ends this weekend, July 26, so here’s a somewhat belated appreciation.

For the past couple of decades or so quite a number of artists have been trying to push the limits of decency in art. It’s good business. Remember the piss Christ, the elephant-dung virgin, Mapplethorp’s special nasties? Feces and bodily functions have been a staple of reputation-building.

All that derives from the artistic career model that grew out of the avant-garde offending the sensibilities of the bourgeoisie, as happened in Paris in the late 19the century when Impressionism and its antecedents descendants outraged the art public.

Robert Boorstin, a senior executive at Google, notes that there are now 1.4 billion Internet users, and the number is growing by 250 million a year. Over 10 hours of video are uploaded to You Tube every minute of every day. There are 3 billion mobile devices in use world wide, with another billion coming in the next year. Boorstin described it as the largest increase in expressive capability in history.

Word comes that a Marsden Hartley painting, Lighthouse, has been sold at auction at Christie’s for $6.31 million, a record for an American Modernist, as the pioneers of modernist art in this country are known. The previous record was set for a Georgia O’Keeffe painting for slightly less in 2001.

Here in Maine we count Hartley (1877 - 1943) as one of our own.

The art world has lost a familiar presence with the recent death of Ed Groome. Ed and his wife, the painter Martha Groome, were always present at every art opening of note, and many that were pretty obscure. They would travel sometimes enormous distances to be part of an opening. It was not unusual to go to see a friend’s show at some little gallery at the end of the last road on a peninsula and find Ed and Martha already there.