Michael Ned Holte.(Gustave Courbet, and Peter Saul exhibitions)("California Video" exhibit)

1 Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics Note to artists--and you know who you are: Stop attempting to produce spectacle. The real thing is always so much more, well, spectacular. New characters and narratives (Michael Phelps, Yao Ming's homecoming, creepy underage gymnasts, and so on) emerged daily at the twenty-ninth Olympiad, but the biggest story of the games was China--a concept as much as a country--which beat the United States in the gold medal tally and out-Hollywooded Hollywood with a jaw-dropping opening ceremony in Herzog & de Meuron's "Bird's Nest." If China's symbolic eclipse of the US wasn't obvious from the first fireworks, a camera trained on the VIP crowd revealed a sweaty, lame-duck W. distractedly slapping a flimsy American flag against his thigh and checking his watch. Enough said.

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2 Gustave Courbet (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York} and Peter Saul (Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA) As evidenced in these overdue retrospectives of two gutsy, obsessive painters, Courbet and Saul capture(d) their respective epochs with blunt pictures that consistently and unapologetically offend(ed) political correctness and painterly taste. Both shows were overwhelming--the former (curated by Gary Tinterow and his …