There’s a series of eight soup can prints on display at “Warhol Soup,” a small exhibit at Armand Bartos Fine Art.  Warhol made them in 1968, six years after he painted the thirty-two soup can that made him famous.  The cans (both the objects and the artworks) are terribly nostalgic.  The labels have different kinds of fancy lettering, a row of fleurs-de-lis, and a big gold medallion.  And some of the varieties, like “Consomme (Beef)” and “Pepper Pot,” are hopelessly out of date.  (The original paintings included soups called “Scotch Broth” and “Cheddar Cheese.”)

The prints made me realize what a fantastic graphic designer Warhol was.  They’re executed with incredible clarity and the red in them is a flat, glorious, perfect red.  The depictions aren’t faithful optically but shrewdly flatten perspectives and filter details to shape an image that’s instantly comprehensible.  Warhol has always been understood as a trickster, but he’s also a brilliant designer.

People are hoarding incandescent light bulbs in anticipation of  federal energy laws that will take effect in 2014 and, basically, take them off the market.  An article in the Times explains that this is because incandescents don’t contain mercury in them, as more efficient fluorescent bulbs do, and are considered safer and cleaner.

There’s no mention of the two best reasons to hoard incandescent bulbs, namely that they’re perfectly formed, and that they produce a quality of light as dazzling and delicate as sunlight.  How can one even compare the elemental, ephemeral form of a typical incandescent bulb to the twisted mess of a screw-in fluorescent?  Much of it is nostalgia, which the Times covered dutifully in an earlier piece.  But something in it is fundamental.  Fluorescents have a cool, cruel bluish cast; they suck the warmth out of a space.  My hope is that the new legislation will push manufacturers to make superior fluorescents.

If there is anyone more annoying than an Architect, it is an Architecture Critic.  These are folks who write about something that, when done properly, cannot be written.  Yet there I was on Tuesday night, packed into the damp, cramped, and drafty Storefront for Art and Architecture, listening to a panel discussion about the state of contemporary architecture criticism.  The critics on the panel did not disappoint, using words like “modality,” “temporalities” and, with disarming frequency, “criticalities."  Panelists from England and Italy lent the proceedings a cosmopolitan flair.  And the woman moderating the panel wore a fluttering yellow Post-it note as an earring.  Was she waiting for an idea to arrive?

Each time a critic took the hand-mic to speak it flared up and buzzed like a light saber.  That only brought to mind how bloodless the discussion really was.  The critics commented lucidly about the decreasing authority of print media and the rising popularity of new media.  They expressed reverence for magazines like Domus, and for the days when architecture critics had travel budgets.  But they exhibited no real concern for architecture or for writing.  The conversation remained meta-critical and, ultimately, rather tame.