PeoriaIllinoisan says he’s sitting on his hands even though he’s got “fireballs coming out of my fingertips.”

Gee, could it be that PI, a big booster of the  Peoria Playhouse Children’s Museum, is just a tad POed at the headline above today’s Journal Star article: “Children’s museum funding drags.” Caterpillar has just announced that it will match employee donations to the Children’s Museum, a small-scale, all-volunteer project. That’s great news. But the headline is a huge downer, and it might imply that the project is in jeopardy, which it is NOT.

Compare that headline to the one above yet another article about the efforts to build a museum at the site of the former Sears block: “Museum officials hold hope.” Unlike the Children’s Museum, the downtown project is very much in jeopardy. Local government’s are NOT going to give them more money, there is no public  enthusiasm for voluntary donations and I wouldn’t be surprised if voters rejected a proposed referendum on public financing failed by a two-to-one margin. Yet the Journal Star article drips with optimism and hope.

It reeks of selective boosterism.

I was excited about the Marsdan Hartley show opening at EPMA this Sunday. He is an important artist who had his first show at Steiglitz’s gallery and really went through the major contemporary art trends of his time which still exert something of an influence on ours. Experimenting with expressionism, then rejecting it for a purely intellectual and formal approach to applying color and then returning to regionalism, and finally before his death in 1943 returning to a kind of expressionism marks him as an important figure; that we will have a specialist in his work giving a lecture on Sunday also enhances the show. I say was excited however because although it in no way detracts from the works, I discovered that this show or a version with the same title also organized by the Frederick Wiseman art Museum in Minneapolis had a ten city run from 1997-2000 so it isn’t exactly a hot off the presses kind of run.. Better late than never I guess, and it doesn’t alter the value of the experience.-david sokolec