Mrs C went to see Rossini at the ROH - says it was really fun. I said that my uncle�s fave composer was Rossini. Not be confused with F Rossi.

Reading the Radartcrit Review I thoroughly agree with the scepticism about Freud. There s a good discussion of some Fr Fem artist who is the most successful in the 19 C. She paints animals - is she a radical realist like Courbet? But the animals are appealing and the bourgeois buy in. She dresses as a man and she takes a wife. What do they do in bed? Bestiality? Who knows - its unanswerable. Gay identity is a 20C construction and so it is impossible to see now how the couple constructed their own lives let alone applied any such constructions to artistic endeavour - compare Merce Cage Rausch Jjohns etc.

My own eccentric view is that the utility of Freud is confined to a few paras in the interpretation of dreams where he speaks about the condensed nature of symbols and to Totton�s book The Water in the Glass. The latter has the added advantage that its title alludes to a line in a PW song about an exchange between himself and the strange Dr Wells and screaming. A post-punk moment. Thought I knew where I had filed Wig but am mistaken - fortunately the search threw up the Block reader I got in Moma - has articles by Pollok (G) Lippard Fred Orton and others eg Judith Williamson interviewing Baudrillard. JW was an influence on me when I was doing advertising.

Both the Lippard and the FO are crackers - slipped off to a Caf� for Sunday breakfast - croissant and Block. The Lippard is written at the end of 70s and is about authenticity in art. From that angle the 70s look messy compared with the 60s but she notes that in the US the punk movement has helped art along. The hegemony that helped establish NYC as the art centre of the world after WW2 is fatally dmaged - and the various movements of the 60s have lost their radical edge - they have become art commodities. This true even of conceptualism which is deliberately trying to avoid that outcome. She wonders what the 80s will vring and whether radical art practice will find a sounder platform. The general view of the 80s was that they started with a new spirit in painting and that the art market went crazy - so relative to LL s starting point things got worse.

FO�s article on Johns is superb as a piece of criticism - more later. Started to watch Doors DVD. Listened to a v abstract Wayne Shorter Blue Note session from 1965.