One of our very favorite art critics, Jerry Saltz, looks on the bright side of the Impending Economic Turmoil. No, it’s not the part where 40 New York galleries close, an art magazine folds and a major art fair collapses. It has more to do with taking the commercial out of art.

What, only a thousand? The Guardian’s art critics have made a list of 1,000 artworks you should see before you die. And that means YOU! And Art Scatter! And anyone else walking around sentient. (We’re actually not sure if Art Scatter qualifies…) OK, it’s a crazy idea on the face of it: We solve the whole Canon Problem by including just about everything. But still, it’s the Guardian, so it’s pretty interesting.

The polymath Stewart Brand (Whole Earth Catalog) wrote, “All buildings are predictions. All predictions are wrong.” Which is the core idea behind both the flexible house movement and Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow’s article on same in the Boston Globe. Why make houses that are so difficult and expensive to remodel, when we know that they must be to accommodate the changing lives of their owners? MIT has been doing some of the best research on the problem in the U.S.