A woodblock print depicting Mt. Fuji, by Katsushika Hokusai, which now belongs to the Seattle Art Museum

There are a few things popping out their in the art world blogosphere today, most notably:

The New Republic charges humorist David Sedaris of fibbing!

During a long conversation from his temporary roost in Tokyo—where he has been holed up trying to quit smoking, poor guy—Sedaris was admirably open to fielding my most obnoxious questions about the hard-to-believe things I had found in some of his stories. He admitted that he had pumped up the Dix episode to tell a funnier yarn and that the juicy details with Clarence didn’t take place.

That seems beyond the boundaries of comic exaggeration. It’s fine to use absurdly embellished descriptions for laughs—this is an essential tool for any humorist. If I write, “I was so hungover, I threw up my own skeleton,” you know I’m kidding. It’s not fine to pretend—in a long and detailed scene—that you performed outlandish, dangerous tasks at a mental hospital when you didn’t.

Now, I generally have less patience for the James Freys and JT Leroys of the world than most of my peers, but this seems ridiculous. Sedaris is a humorist who writes about his own life, and I don’t think anybody in the world believes that his stories are factual. They’re like old Richard Pryor routines—you can tell they’re grounded in reality, but nobody calls him a liar for suggesting that his dog started talking to him.

In other news, the Seattle Art Museum announced today that it received a gift of $1 billion worth of art. One billion. With a B. The gift includes major works by luminaries such as Mark Rothko, Edward Hopper, Ed Ruscha, etc. etc. etc. Usually when museums receive major gifts, their impact is not immediately noticable to the general public, but this massive gift (a cluster of gifts, really), is likely to impact the reputation and importance of SAM in the eyes of museums and art lovers across the country. Somebody has some thank you notes to start writing!