Sometimes legislation in Sacramento is rushed through with unintended consequences, an unfortunate example being a newly expanded law posing problems for art dealers. This 2016 amendment to California Civil Code Section 1739.7 was intended to broaden a law that...
Life happens fast. Yesterday’s dystopian fiction is today’s reality. American history now includes a woman in the 21st century being arrested and found guilty by a jury for laughing at somebody. Most places that have an awareness of despots also have some pearls of...
I Love A Man in a Uniform Dear Babs, Why is it that with all the focus on hip, cutting-edge contemporary art displayed in modern museums and galleries, the security guards dress like they are working at the May Company in the ’70s? The women dress like men and the...
The film Manifesto speaks in the voice of the 20th century, when manifestos meant something—a time when the latest artist or art movement stormed the Bastille of conformity, declaring the one true doctrine—theirs, naturally—and the rest of us sat up and paid...
Elena Shtromberg is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Utah. She is co-curator (with Glenn Phillips, curator and head of modern and contemporary collections at the Getty Research Institute) for the PST LA/LA exhibition of “Video Art In Latin...
Kick the Can by Maw Shein Win That utopian moment when the film begins & the sound spins, awash in honey & blood, saliva & wine. Let’s kick the can! Alive in the eye of projection, variations of pink on aqua. In Icelandic they say “invisible.” In Spanish...
It’s Too Hot Not to Cool Down, 2017
NEW MUSEUM IN TOWN Welcome Marciano Art Foundation on Wilshire Boulevard! It’s the new museum that features the contemporary art collection of Paul and Maurice Marciano, two of the brothers who founded the hip jeans company Guess and became zillionaires. The museum...
Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 Untitled painting of a skull looks like a prison that can barely contain all the rage, anger and fierce memories that drive a person. Painted in graffiti style, it is young and barely controlled. You wonder how it is ever going to get...
The figures are in motion, contorted, double-jointedly bending over themselves—so confused with playing multiple roles that a single, consistent identity becomes, at best, elusive and in its most virulent form, theater of the absurd; a brand of schizophrenia that...
In exquisite large-scale photographs, figures of hope, variously tinged with the pain of day-to-day reality, exude optimism, gazing upward and confidently looking straight at the camera and viewer. The portraits in Star Montana’s “I Dream of Los Angeles” punctuate the...
Abstract Expressionist painting remains one of the most pivotal and enigmatic art movements of the 20th century. Its continued influence on current abstract painting can be seen in the work of the best practitioners such as Albert Oehlen, Yayoi Kusama and Frank...
The term forbidden fruit nowadays refers to mere guilty pleasures, but it once designated the fatal, tragic fruit of knowledge—knowledge of sex, or course, being a discovery that every generation makes defiantly, with mingled trepidation and delight. Chris Antemann’s...
Forty-three works in an expansive range of media highlight Richard Deacon’s versatility in a broad yet uneven survey of the British sculptor’s art from 1979–2016 in “What You See Is What You Get” at The San Diego Museum of Art. Deacon’s austerely lyrical...
Teresa Solar Abboud, Untitled, 2017, detail photography from her “Ground Control” solo show at Galeria Joan Prats in Barcelona; part of our Summer Travel Issue where contributor Leanna Robinson visits Barcelona's underground art scene....
Are you one of those people who have difficulty making clear-cut distinctions between your night(or day)mares and the actuality of your everyday life? (I am – especially when I’m running a fever.) Jim Shaw not only gets you; he’s created a sacred space for your...
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