http://www.ccchronicle.com/paper/arts.php?id=1233

any thoughts?

He's not dumb. These points have all been made before, but if you ride that bubble between having secret svc agents come check your exhibit out and and actually "disappearing," you can really garner a lot of attention. And attention helps him make his point, after all.

apparently, from the local news, the stamp in question is the portrait of bush with the the hand and gun pointing at him and "The Patriot Act" emblazoned on it.

Does that merit The Secret Service launching an investigation, and should the curator provide the name of the artist?

I suppose it's possible that the artist in question has designs on the president, but maybe the secret service could have been more elegant in their investigation to find the artist's name.

Art that seeks to be controversial seems to have less artistic merit to me. Art that is controversial without seeking to be often seems to be of high artistic merit, at least in my opinion.

Case in point, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. It's just a ballet, how'd it escalate into a riot? That's bad ass. It's a classic because it was forward thinking from inception to execution, and incited those results because people weren't ready for it, not because it tried to be controversial. At least, that's what I think, maybe if i was around in 1913 I would have thought differently.