MAKING ART IN A POST-GLOBAL WORLD
Lowbrow began in the early 1980s as an art movement that embraced the attitudes and iconography of distinctly American subcultures, embracing demolition derbies and surfing instead of “highbrow” French Impressionist painting or Italian operas. Although there were...
Architectural Eye Candy
Architect John Bohn rolled into the parking lot off 4th Street and Traction Avenue, where the security guard acknowledged him with a subtle nod as he drove through the gate. Bohn is on the faculty of SCI-Arc, the country’s hippest architecture school, located in the...
Liz Young – Of Blood and Dirt
You might call Liz Young a conceptual artist. One would certainly address some of her earlier work in such terms; and on a certain level, she still is – except that in her hands, the ‘concept’ is really a kind of generative nucleus of ideas, assuming form organically,...
Coagula Curatorial: Manuel Ocampo & Irene Iré
Manuel Ocampo and Irene Iré accomplish the often-difficult task of formulating a joint show that appears cohesive without sacrificing the styles of either artist. Their different styles of abstract and figurative, colorful and subdued seem to be engaged in a...
Turner Prize 2017 shortlist announced
Tate Britain today announced the four artists who have been shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2017. The artists are (in alphabetical order): Hurvin Anderson, Andrea Büttner, Lubaina Himid and Rosalind Nashashibi. This year an exhibition of work by the four shortlisted...
Art Fatigue at its Best
I’ve heard of the phenomenon of art fatigue—getting so sick of looking at art that one more derivative Franz Kline-esque painting will turn you into a raging honey badger. The first two hours of the Brewery Art Walk on Saturday were delightful, browsing studios tucked...
Online Exhibition: RED!
Wow! I can't believe how many of you responded to the call for entries for RED! Thank you! It wasn't easy narrowing it down, but I have chosen 15 images to share with you. Entries from women out-numbered those from men by an almost 3-1 ratio and that is reflected in...
“Sponsored Video” The Summer of Love Experience at the de Young
At the time, it was a sort of impromptu youth festival, a San Francisco combination of Spring Break and Endless Summer. Young people caught up in nascent social rebellion, many of them runaways, found a focus in the San Francisco Haight district, and there evolved new...
Amino Acids – ACME.
As its title implies, Amino Acids reaches towards a place elemental and foundational, and implicitly existential – the conditions and pre-conditions of life (or even before life), the processes that generate it; and the conditions of life’s mouldering remains – what...
The Good Luck Gallery: John Hiltunen
Mark Twain is generally credited with the quote, “The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog.” The artist of this exhibition also likes dogs—and cats, owls and even the odd tyrannosaur. As charming as a Saint-Saëns composition and sardonic as an Orwell...
Chris Kraus: She Loved Dick
“Get off Bonnie Brae!” Chris Kraus shouts from the car speakerphone when I resort to calling her for directions. I’m lost in MacArthur Park, a neighborhood that borders downtown Los Angeles, looking for the writer/critic’s house. I wasn’t sure if Kraus raised her...
Culture Clash
Can art hurt people? In mid-February, I sat in Boyle Heights’ El Tepeyac café across from a revolutionary named A. and probed him with questions in order to find out. A., a slim Latinx man wearing Elvis Costello glasses, belongs to the anti-gentrification group Defend...
Jason Rhoades at Hauser & Wirth
It’s true what they say. You can’t go home again—even if home is a neon jungle. Even if you’ve remade that neon jungle into your own constantly morphing, expanding universe. Even if that jungle is based upon an ideal garden of your youth, into which you’ve sown every...
Luring Millennials into Museums
It used to be about the art. It used to be that seeing (and being told to step back from) a Picasso was enough. But, once again, millennials have ruined it for everyone. Simply admiring a statue is as anathema as simply watching a movie without simultaneously texting,...
Infinite Epiphany: Yayoi Kusama
“Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors” at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, is an ambitious show by any stretch of the imagination, boasting six of Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms together with a selection of other work from the remarkable 65-year...
Fabulous Tales
Injecting one or more inane Star Wars puns into a discussion of George Lucas’ proposed museum would be de rigueur; but I’ll abstain. It is time to take Lucas’ idea seriously. Suspend the adulation. Cut the skepticism of commercial pictures’ merit. A 275,000...
Coachella Hosts Desert X
Desert X, we love the name of this art biennial out in the Coachella Valley—“X” as the unknown, the sexy, the je-ne-sais-quoi factor. There is something mysterious and alluring about the desert, with its sere, sparse, wide-open expanses and its promise of...
