Well, I've been out of circulation for a while, hence ArtHeat has been incredibly boring. But what a way to make a return... The fun started with a certain part time staff member being very disgruntled that he was not included in the show (especially when this time around they included part time staff, maybe to bolster the pretty paltry output of the full-time staff. Though browsing through the catalogue I did feel they pushed the definition of Staff pretty thin). It ended with an almost shouting match with Steven Inges, an innocent party to the whole problem.

The next bit of fun was discovering that the school desk Gavin Younge used for his work Boyhood was stolen from Masters Student Linda Stupart. It still has Linda's name written in big pink glitter pen on the inside . I believe she's busy negotiating for the ownership of the artwork. Or at least trying to leach some drinking money from Gavin. Talking of this work, (which was better than most work on the show) what's with Michaelis Staff and bloody laser cutting. Is it the new toy? And what's with Pippa Skotnes? Why is her work still demeaning and on the border of being racist? Or am I the only one who doesn't get it? And it was in collaboration with Malcolm Payne. I hope that wasn't his bad photoshop work, little oval frames and a gradient on the text. Yuk.

Virginia MacKenny does make nice paintings, and I normally struggle to understand paintings. Someone explained it to me quite simply and that was good. I think I'm going to get a guide to explain every painting I see from now on. Maybe I'll start to like the medium.

Andrew Lamprecht's work took me a while to figure out. It only dawned on me when I read his entry in the catalogue ( a formal challenge to Christian Nerf, a boxing match, to settle their differences and the age old fight between theorist and artist). He displayed, hanging from the ceiling, straps of the kind that pugilists wrap up their hands. The brand name was Print. That's kinda witty, I think. I did start to get this feeling of being drained after that, and kinda depressed. I had to go sit outside, get some fresh air. What I thought, as I drained the dregs of a bottle Chateau Libertas, what I thought was, "I hate academic art, it's boring." Then I thought, "I hate academic art writing, it's useless." And then I thought, "Thank God, these people no longer teach me." The Camembert, as usual, was awesome.