I recently came across MW Capacity, Chris Lowrance and Sam King’s “painter blog for no-coasters,” and if you’re not already among its readers I encourage you to start checking it out on a regular basis.

MW Capacity focuses on painting in the Midwest, and I love their approach: lots of images, very brief write-ups on the artists (and sometimes none at all, just pictures) and that’s it. The blogs’ readers take over from there in the comments, resulting in an online version of group crit that’s surprisingly respectful and considered given our tendency on the internet to let the s*&t fly first and think about it later.

Today MW Capacity posted on Angelina Gualdoni’s new work at Kavi Gupta (and have also covered her in the past, with a relatively large number of comments on the work in response). They also had an interesting group discussion on Jim Lutes. But no gang rapes allowed: the blog’s policy is to take down posts if an artist doesn’t want to be there. It seems to be a pretty friendly and laid back atmosphere, so I imagine having one’s work featured would be something to feel excited about, not fear.

I don’t Tweet, and no one can convince me that Wikipedia is a fundamentally reliable source of knowledge, but I’m definitely intrigued by gallerist and 20 x 200 impresario Jen Bekman’s experiment in “crowd-sourced curation.”  Bekman asked fellow Twitterers to recommend artists they’d like to see participate in  20 x 200, and received a deluge of suggestions in response. Get the full story here.

Did any of you New York readers see Bekman’s talk “Overcrowded – How crowd sourcing is ruining everything” at Ignite NYC III last week? If you did, can you give us the lowdown in the comments? Bekman’s take on the issue is of interest, as she’s one of only a few dealers to develop a successful model for marketing affordable contemporary art to the masses. Makes me wonder if or how phenomena like micro-blogging and crowd-sourcing will  affect the future of art criticism as well as institutional curation. I’m sure there’s a number of art critics already twittering out there (are there any who now use Twitter exclusively?), and you know some enterprising curator will find a way to Tweet out an art show, it’s only a matter of time.