So, time for a little Ratstruthtelling. Ready? Your humble editor's career-motivated research reveals that some of the best colleges in the country actually have some of the stinkiest art departments available to undergraduates, anywhere. (No exceptions: though a few of my professors were amazing mentors to me, Yale School of Art circa 1990-1994 was not a very auspicious place to be an undergraduate painter.) Internecine warfare among faculty & lack of intellectual exchange with the outside world can leave departments stifling for years on end. Students scrape out horrible little paintscrapings, progressing little & in any case unsure of any personal or professional framework for understanding progress.

Meanwhile, anywhere, there are young artists who find real work, and make it. Class of 2005 Dartmouth College grad Diane Lee is one of these. Her One Woman Production Line in the student senior show (held in the Hopkins Center in June) is a strong showing by any measure, and almost a miracle by the measure of many of her peers. Her motley disreputable-looking beasties hang from the gallery ceiling on garden-twine lines, drooping this way and that, like so many underfilled, drool-stained pillows, or roadside toy casualties. Closer examination reveals that the staining comes from the inside: the fishes & dolphins & frogs & rats & cats & chimeras are all filled with tea. Zoomorphic teabags dangling for enormous cups of brew? What if anything have they got to do with the tea-trade between China and the West? What about the production line? Lee's work and Yin Xiuzhen's giant handsewn airplanes share, I think, a common sense of humor, contemplating the tens of thousands of anonymous Asian workers producing the astonishing array of stuff taken for granted by consumers in the US. What if all the sewing workers of the People's Republic massed together and made things rooted in the logic of dreams, rather than hardmarketlogic? What if the labor power of the Autonomous Economic Zones decided once and for all they were sick to the teeth of WalMart polo shirts, and somehow took control of the factories' resources? What if what they made circulated in a gift economy? (Lee gives away the products of her One Woman Production Line to anyone who asks. My love and I went on a gleeful 15 minute creature-spree, wielding scissors like mad fruit-harversters.)

Generous, witty, and sufficiently obsessive to get the job done, Diane Lee sends her audiences home with glittering questions and fresh-plucked beasties in hand. The Rat salutes her efforts, and can't wait to see what she does next.