Have you noticed, these last few years, the striking preponderance of wood grain in the ?fine arts"? Next time you go to a show at any contemporary gallery or museum or leaf thru an issue of Art Forum or any other trendy art magazine, keep your eyes peeled for: faux wood grain, actual chunks of wood grain, drawings of wood grain, or anything else either faintly or boldly suggestive of wood grain.

So, what?s up with the wood grain? Is it all a coincidence? In those arts we used to call the avant garde, which, whatever they are called these days, are still supposed to over-exert themselves and remain ever on the unfamiliar edge of the new, how could one ?original? or ?maverick? artist after another be inspired to use wood grain? Does this dangling signifier hold some key to the modern condition? Is it an inside joke? Clearly it is a trend?but in that case, is it *gasp* trendy?

& what does wood grain mean to the art world? Does it signify, um, Authenticity, which is not actually authenticity, but rather, um, the campy and ironic appropriation of ?natural? texture into the artificial ?canvas? of Big Art, as if to say, ?In our lives, as in art, the Authentic is dead"? Is this a reference to, or a recapitulation of, that by now ancient cubist piece by George Braques, the famous one, where he pasted a sort of hardware-store-grade linoleum wood grain panel onto his illustration of a chair, so that the fake real is glued onto his real fake? Yawn. Am I missing something?

The whole thing reminds me of the alleged time in the 80s when Mr. T, star of the A Team, bought a house with acres of lovely property in a lily-white wealthy suburb north of Chicago. For the benefit of his stuck-up neighbors, the week he moved in, he fired up a chain saw and took down all of the old beautiful trees on his property. But to really mess with his neighbors, he made sure to leave the ugly stumps. I myself am not into cutting down hundred year old trees, but of all the people working in wood grain, I appreciate Mr. T as truly an artist.