columns
Russ Meyer: FISHIN’ and TITTIN’
People have been photographing sex since the invention of cameras. But the distribution of moving images that depict actual sex acts only became possible in the early 1970s. X-rated films shown in theaters were subject to prosecution into the 1980s. As content moved...
SHOPTALK
Museums and Unions The Marciano Art Foundation has closed, abruptly and in a cloud of controversy. Since its opening in 2017, most of the employees worked part-time, handling visitor services and making close to minimum-wage salaries. On November 1, District Council...
Illustrate Your Love
Dear Babs, I’m in college majoring in illustration and minoring in fine art. My problem is some of my fine-art professors put down illustration and make it seem I can’t be part of the “Art World” and still be an illustrator. What do I do? —Stymied Student Dear Stymied...
Interview with Joanne Leah
Joanne Leah is a Brooklyn-based artist. In 2016 she founded Artists Against Censorship, a platform that catalogs artists‘ experiences with social media censorship. She currently serves as a liaison between censored artists and policymakers at Facebook and Instagram to...
Testing Russ Meyer: FISHIN’ and TITTIN’ COPY
People have been photographing sex since the invention of cameras. But the distribution of moving images that depict actual sex acts only became possible in the early 1970s. X-rated films shown in theaters were subject to prosecution into the 1980s. As content moved...
The Motherload of Crap Hound
Sean Tejaratchi is a taxonomic guerrilla and semiotic hoarder. His social media phenomenon (and book) Liartown generated a tsunami of WTF memes, that have been described as “layered, multivalent detournees of the entire gamut of visual culture from the last century...
jill moniz: The Quotidian Blacksmith
jill moniz has been a curator at the California African American Museum (CAAM) and is now principal of her own downtown gallery, Quotidian. She curated the current exhibition “LA Blacksmith” at CAAM. I understand that you have a PhD in cultural anthropology—how and...
Shoptalk
Go Directly to Go The fall art season has taken off like a steeplechase, with so many openings on the weekends that one can take in barely a fraction of them. In addition to the shows at galleries and museums (Lari Pittman at the Hammer and Echiko Ohira at Craft...
Art Brief
In September during a visit to Paris, I got lost in the Louvre, a common occurrence caused by its diabolical mazelike layout (maps are useless) and I found myself in the museum’s Oriental Antiquities wing. After viewing hundreds of paintings in the French and Italian...
SIGHTS UNSCENE
UNDER THE RADAR
You always hear about how we’re living in a golden age of TV, but you rarely hear the same thing about comic books. Which is weird, since comic books have taken over the film industry, further fueling the current golden age of TV. But far below the Olympian economics...
Bunker Vision
Shortly after I installed the YouTube channel, I found my official “sport.” I went for weeks not knowing what this wonderful thing that I was watching was called. Even though I had seen Paris is Burning and watched a season of Pose, I didn’t immediately make the...
ASK BABS
DEAR BABS: "I’ve been an artist for a long time and I want to get rid of my old art. I don’t want it anymore and I don’t want to try and sell it, but I feel bad just throwing it in the dumpster. What’s the best way to get rid of my art?” Bernard, Los Angeles Dear...
SHOPTALK
Tarry Nights at LACMA It’s summer, but the traffic is as bad as ever, and the art world continues to percolate. Yours Truly recently came upon an evening concert at LACMA which was jam-packed from the stage at BP Plaza to where the museum conjoins with La Brea...
SIGHTS UNSCENE
UNDER THE RADAR
Perhaps the best-known configuration of the ever-shifting alliances within the legendary Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) is the art-noise supergroup Extended Organ (XO). There’s some irony in this—apart from the very concept of an art noise supergroup—in the...
BUNKER VISION
“I am a wound and a sword, a victim and an executioner” are the first words that appear on the screen. A tender love scene follows, filmed in extreme close-up, that might have come from any black-and-white European art film of the 1960s. As the camera pulls back and...
