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Elkins's "more of it around than anybody can read" refers mainly to specialist art publications, from the glossiest and most readable to the most hermetic and small-circulation "little magazines." But occasionally, one of the mass-circulation magazines offers what's called in the business a "package" or "takeout" on art. The December 2006 Vanity Fair, for instance, devoted almost 80 pages in what its cover designated "The Art Issue" to the contemporary art "universe." To be fair, the VF treatment did offer a platter of red meat--a symposium on the state of the art world with a prominent dealer, collector, editor, artist, auctioneer and curator, profiles of established and emerging artists, and looks back at the Warhol Factory and the dramatis personae of early modernism. But, in the context of a magazine that smells like a cosmetics counter, feels like a Christmas catalogue and looks like a runway show, art bottom-lined once again as a frou-frou for the trendy rich. In W's "Art Issue," which ran a month earlier, art fared no better.

Judging by the newspapers of many major American cities and some national magazines, the more straightforwardly journalistic popular press appears to be covering art with some thoroughness. Roberta Smith, Holland Cotter and Michael Kimmelman at the New York Times, Peter Schjeldahl at the New Yorker, Mark Stevens at New York magazine, Jerry Saltz at the Village Voice, Jed Perl at the New Republic, Arthur Danto at the Nation, Ken Johnson (now) at the Boston Globe, Edward Sozanski and Edith Newhall at the Philadelphia Inquirer, Christopher Knight and David Pagel at the Los Angeles Times, Kenneth Baker at the San Francisco Chronicle, Robert L. Pincus at the San Diego Union-Tribune and several others produce a veritable mountain of words about art every month. And most if not all of their publications also print additional art writing by freelancers and stringers.