by Lori Waxman

ADOLF GIULIANI
        In case your TV was on the fritz the night Jay Leno publicly compared New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani to the head of the Nazi party, allow art tart to recount the details. For the record, the host of the Tonight Show stated that Giuliani's art policies, which most recently led him to appoint an Art Decency Commission (whose members include the mayor's divorce lawyer, the artist wife of a Republican senator, the founder of the Guardian Angels, and a New Jersey CEO who contributed to the mayor's campaign fund) bear a striking resemblance to Hitler's. Leno went on to expound knowledgeably on Hitler's Degenerate Art Show, which featured confiscated modern German art critical of him, the Nazi party, or aspects of German society which aided the party's rise to power. Just imagine the fabulous art that Giuliani could curate as part of his own degenerate art show.

AVANT-GARDE EXPANSIONS
        Minneapolis' Walker Art Center recently announced that the Swiss team of Herzog & de Meuron, winners of this year's Pritzker Prize and architects of the stunning new Tate Modern, have been chosen to lead the museum's $90 million expansion and renovation. The Boston Institute of Fine Arts, for its part, has picked New Yorkers Diller + Scofidio, the first architects to win a MacArthur Foundation genius grant, to design its new waterfront facility. The results, in both cases, can only be of the swishiest nature, and surely more exciting than Chicago's own MCA and AIC managed when they hired Josef Paul Kleihues and the firm of Hammond, Beeby, Rupert and Ainge to build, respectively, a giant mausoleum and a dull-as-beige neo-neo-classical addition.

BLOTTING OUT ART
        Despite millions spent on phone taps, mail monitoring, surveillance, and a SWAT-style raid of his apartment, federal drug authorities failed to send Mark McCloud to jail. The artist's collection of nearly 400 framed LSD blotters, as well as 30,000 sheets of his own blotter art, examples of which have been exhibited at the San Francisco Art Institute, and none of which contained any traces of acid, were seized in the raid. McCloud, who is of course based in San Francisco, was acquitted of conspiring to distribute LSD, charges which could have led to a life sentence. The defense argued that the artist could not be held responsible if, as has happened, others used his artwork as a vehicle for drugs. They also put an art critic on the stand to testify to McCloud's place in the American folk-art tradition.