A contemporary artist who worked through era after era of contemporary art's total reinvention by becoming more and more the same, Andrew Wyeth was best not discussed in progressive art world circles. With his father N.C. and son Jamie, Wyeth held a dynastic, unimpeachable perch from his country estate in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and the artist's silent, timeless observation of rural life uninterested in change was dismissed by some as irrelevant, drab, or as aristocratic folly for the enjoyment of the middle class.

But today, after news of the artist's death at 91, the statistics from the general public speak for themselves: Wyeth's 2006 retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with 175,000 visitors in four months, broke all attendance records for a living artist. 1948's Christina's World remains one of the Museum of Modern Art's top-ten perennial attractions, and the beautiful scene's paradoxically heavy narrative--a woman, paralyzed from the waist down, crawls up a hill toward home on a bright afternoon--can serve as a manifesto for the man's approach. It is a wrought scene, but the experience of looking at it can be gentle, above all, before agitating the viewer into a journey to more complicated emotions. Being prim and low-key, with prettiness as the work's abiding message, gave the artist formidable currency in reproduction. Wyeth was, perhaps, America's favorite artist.

End-of-year charts, summings-up and memorials are blog fuel; a chance to collect and bundle all the pebbles of in-out daily-posted wisdom into weightier, wiser statements. I'm surprised, then, that apart from a touching Idolator report in early December, the July death of Khia 'K-Swift' Edgerton has not borne more tributes as the calendar turns.

Edgerton was a 29-year-old Baltimore DJ, radio personality, MC, promoter, producer and businesswoman who set an example to others in every aspect of her life.'The Club Queen' was a thorough and passionate promoter of Baltimore Club music, a sound that has thrived in the city since the early '90s. She worked her way up the city's top radio station, 92Q, while still in her teens, eventually holding the evening slot five nights a week, breaking new tunes, hyping club nights, supporting artists. She was the director of the Direct Drive record pool, a distro that got the top scene DJs all the important new 12"s. She played out locally every week. She was an excellent vinyl DJ, and released scores of mixtapes.

Nineteen-year-old Peaches Geldof is a pretty girl, often a bit too made-up, who hasn't had to work very hard thus far in her life. She has surfed through her teens on daily tabloid headlines in the UK, renewing and clarifying her fame with fresh antics. Like many extremely rich young people with slightly cracked upbringings in the spotlight--Geldof's father is pop humanitarian/career Pigpen/Boomtown Rat Bob, her mother Paula Yates, a brassy and missed TV presenter who died from a heroin overdose in 2000--Peaches is prone to doing impulsive and screwy things: buying coke on camera; ping-pong dating a kaleidoscope of rockers who looked funny on her arm; the inevitable whirlwind romance (with Max Drummey, he of the seemingly kiddie-band Chester French) followed by the Vegas wedding. Peaches lives in Williamsburg now, closer to her hubby of four months.

Geldof is proud to have a ton of opinions and taste, so much so that she is now the Editor-at-Large and God voice of Disappear Here, a glossy young person's lifestyle magazine whose free and ad-free Issue 0 dropped in a smattering of hip venues in Brooklyn and the LES last weekend. 'Things We Love' is the theme of the issue, allowing about half of the content to be lists, charts, and quickie interviews: appetizer portions of ideas. George Plimpton she's not, but the magazine gleefully encourages her piercing precocity. Vulgar, clueless rhetoric blankets the scene. It is best to consider John McCain, we learn, "naked, [with] every last one of his orifices stuffed with dough by someone much bigger and domineering than himself." Or, in a reflective mood: "What a year it's been for the Grim Reaper [...] Ledger's lifeless and Newman is no more. Even Isaac Bloody Hayes has snuffed it, and he's a Scientologist. They're not meant to die."

"It was an insane time, we would stay up for days at a time and smoke George Burns cigars and listen to Henny Youngman standup routines and watch W.C. Fields movies and write jokes, homemade jokes, jokes with missing punchlines. Those were really good times."

By the age of 22, Harmony Korine had written the screenplay to Kids and was notorious the world over. He's 35 now, and the artist/filmmaker's bulging rap sheet of books, films, and artworks continues to inspire, disgust, and elude in equal measure. The Collected Fanzines, released today, compiles eight long-gone booklets from 1992 to 1999, a period that spanned Korine's graduation from high school, Kids, and his first two features, Gummo and Julien Donkey-Boy. Scraps of thoughts strung together--impressionistic jokes, story fragments, Hollywood apocrypha, and lists--offer unaltered evidence of the artist's creative process through his 20s. We spoke on the phone as Korine took a morning dog-walk in a Nashville field dotted with old folks combing for Civil War artifacts with metal detectors. "If there was anything here you'd think they'd have found it years ago," he said, perplexed but unjudgmental.--William Pym