Believer magazine's annual art issue

On newsstands for awhile now, I finally got into reading The Believer's annual art issue. It's good. Among the many interesting tidbits and features, there's a great background on Lawrence Weschler's re-released book on Robert Irwin and new book on David Hockney. An enlightening interview with Frank Stella -- I was surprised by what could be kindly termed his "forthrightness". The interesting suggestion that art's relationship to the real world is analogous to a child's fort's relationship to a house. And an article which I can't resist quoting from here, "A Perfunctory Affair" by Chirs Cobb, about his work installing the new Sol LeWitt über-exhibition at MASS MoCA:

"To give a broader sense of the installation’s scale: the drawings we’d come to install would occupy nearly an acre of wall space. The estimated project budget was about 10 million dollars. It would take almost fifty people putting in eight-hour days, six days a week, from April to October, to complete the installation. Thousands of yards of red rosin paper were needed to cover the floors as we painted. Other supplies we required: hundreds of rolls of white receipt paper; brown roll paper in one-foot and half-foot lengths; dozens of rulers; dozens of boxes of drafting tape in one-inch and half-inch lengths; dozens of boxes of blue masking tape, paper towels, and thin green tape; rolls of plastic sheeting; gallons and gallons of Benjamin Moore house paint in white, black, and gray; dozens of bottles of Lascaux acrylic paint in black, white, red, yellow, and blue; dozens of gallons of distilled water (for mixing with the Lascaux paint); more than a thousand water-soluble pastel crayons in white, red, yellow, and blue; dozens of paintbrushes in various sizes; several cases of large foam core board sheets; thousands of razor blades; lots of Spackle; many, many rolls of sheet plastic; dozens of paint trays and liners; paint rollers, stirring sticks, etc., etc., etc.

"For the pencil drawings, red, blue, yellow, and graphite pencil leads were ordered (180,000 of each color). Once the project started, there would be up to three people a day doing nothing but sharpening pencil leads."

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