STREET ART ALIVE is a 25,000 sq. ft. immersive “multi-sensory art and culture experience” that presents Street Art from Los Angeles and other major cities around the world. The interior entrance to the show features a recreation of an ‘80s New York City subway station...
WAYS OF NOT SEEING
If, as John Berger writes, “Oil painting… is a celebration of private property”, then Street Art is the equally joyous appreciation of public property. This difference is due to the nature of the work and their contrasting environments: Graffiti beats the streets...
CURATING THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE
On July 4th, CNN’s website featured photographs of drawings done by several ten-year-old migrant children who had been separated from their parents by US Customs and Border Protection. After their release from CBP, the Catholic Charities Humanitarian Respite Center,...
Cover Versions
Like many Pre-Millennial truths that were once irrefutable, the adage, “Don’t judge a book by its cover” is waning into obsolescence. After all, what is the utility of a book cover in the era of e-books that claim neither form nor substance? In his exhibition...
Justice Howard’s Voodoo
Major religions don’t do much image control; with his long hair and white skin, the hippyesque Jesus of the 21st century looks identical to the savior of the 11th century. The Buddha is also presented as the same old, same old; hair or no hair, it’s the smilin’ guy...
THE EVIL OF BANALITY – Rachel Feinstein at Gagosian
Times change. In 1963, Hannah Arendt famously wrote about Adolf Eichmann and the “banality of evil”; in 2018 we get artist Rachel Feinstein exploring the evil of banality. It’s not just that the pieces at Secrets, her latest show at Gagosian, are banal, they’re...
Paul McCarthy: Let ‘Em Eat Garbage
In much of his work, Paul McCarthy explores juvenilia to an uncomfortably advanced degree, finding profane inspiration in all things coprocentric and aesthetically offensive. But McCarthy’s current exhibition at the Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles gallery appears to...
HITTING A NERVE OF STEEL
Art galleries can be places where the mundane becomes divine, but as the front door of the Honor Fraser Gallery closed behind me, I knew that what I saw was what I was gonna get. In front of me was what appeared to be a selection of various types and lengths of...