It’s an amazing true story—the real story behind the phenomenally successful paintings of those children with those big, sad eyes of the ’50s and ’60s, the ones that defined “kitsch.” We always thought it was this fellow named Walter Keane who painted them, but it...
What do Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Richard Prince and Jeff Koons have in common? If you answered all are old white-guy artists that make lots of money with their art, you would have answered correctly. But they have another thing in common. They are all NOT...
When the Hong Kong police first used tear gas and rubber bullets on the crowd of young and unarmed demonstrators in front of the government building on Hong Kong island—the moment the so-called Umbrella Revolution started in earnest—I was just arriving in the lovely...
In an unassuming location next to a bus station and a shopping arcade in the huge Southern Chinese city of Guangzhou is Vitamin Creative Space, an experimental art space created to engage with contemporary China but “inspired by the confrontation between contemporary...
The 5th Yokohama Triennale closing ceremony ended with the burning of the specially created book, “Moe Nai Ko To Ba,” ironically titled “Words That Can’t Be Burned,” an homage to Ray Bradbury’s novel, Fahrenheit 451. This custom one-of-a-kind book was a centerpiece of...
While contemporary Chinese artists such as Ai Weiwei and Cai Guo-Qiang often grab international headlines with their projects and exhibitions, there are very few women among them. Lin Tianmiao is one of the few. That is very much due to the strength of her work, the...
In case you didn’t notice, Hello Kitty invaded Los Angeles in November. If you were anywhere near Little Tokyo, you could scarcely escape the impression that not only that neighborhood, but half the population of LA’s downtown and east side had been initiated into the...
Dear Babs, Is there a “best” way to get paint off a cat?—Jim, Los AngelesDear Jim, Firstly, you didn’t specify if the paint was oils or acrylics. This is important to know as I am fully aware of feline behavioral patterns of constant grooming, meaning licking their...
There’s something wonderful about the idea that one of Japan’s most avant-garde films was originally intended to be a second feature for a double bill from a studio that was famous for cranking out formulaic Yakuza B movies. Seijun Suzuki began his stint at Nikkatsu...
Let me tell you what I liked about The Interview: the print promotion. Loved the Marx-Engels, classic Communist kitsch-futurist filtered through an ironically pixelated CGI-inflected graphic poster design. The trailer did not look particularly promising; though I...
Almost since its inception, photography has been characterized by historians and critics as perpetually in crisis. The current divergent trends—a democratizing of the form through digital cameras and social media vs. the ontological investigation of the medium by...
In 1955, the 31-year-old Swiss photographer Robert Frank went looking for America, driving 10,000 miles across 30 states, in a kind of photographic enactment of Jack Kerouac’s beat novel, On the Road. If the novel functions today as a rite of passage for disaffected...
In September I managed to view the last day of the remarkable “Degenerate Art ” exhibition at cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder’s Neue Galerie in New York City, a museum which regularly displays pre-war German and Austrian art. Subtitled “The Attack on Modern Art in Nazi...
Asians make up 10.7% of Angelenos, but you’ll need the combined fortune of all of Chinatown’s good-luck golden cats to find .1% of Asian graffiti. Among the Chinatowns, Little Tokyos, Thai Towns, and Filipino Towns, while the signs are subtitled in Asian characters,...
In the early ’70s, during the couple of years before punk broke, one of the most exciting subcultural zeitgeists centered around a trio of novels—ostensibly sci-fi—written by former Playboy associate editors Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, detailing the secret...
Los Angeles was treated to some remarkable public conversations this fall. In early October The Broad conversations series presented a fascinating dialogue between artist Kara Walker and filmmaker Ava DuVernay. A few weeks later the Hammer Museum offered up a...
The secret to a successful trip to Art Basel Miami is not the fair itself, but getting in on the hoopla created by the other events that surround it. Artillery did just that when invited to join an exclusive BMW art caravan—the purpose of which was not divulged to us...
The Marjorie Cameron exhibition arrives before one enters the gallery. It comes on the streets of West Hollywood. Banners hang from every other streetlight, advertising the MOCA show, featuring the artist’s self-portrait. Cameron was the consummate Los Angeles...
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