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,...
Anuradha Vikram is a transcultural critic, curator and educator who’s worked with a variety of contemporary artists from around the world and I’m not. So I invited her into my column to compensate for my ignorance.ZAK SMITH: So: “Asian Art”?ANURADHA VIKRAM: I don’t...
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...
Mark Steven Greenfield has been something of a fixture on the Los Angeles art scene since the 1970s, better known as an administrator and arts advocate than as an artist. Greenfield has not bowed out of high-profile art-related activity altogether, but he is now able...
Death, destruction, strife and pollution—the pairing of Kris Kuksi’s and Preston Daniels’ variations of dark sensationalism transport us to their version of artistically-mediated Armageddon, with each creating unique and hauntingly extravagant objects. Kuksi’s baroque...
A master of text-based montage working in the traditions of Fluxus, Concrete Poetry and Dada, Tm Gratkowski pays homage to artists like Kurt Schwitters and Tristan Tzara, whose complex word/image juxtapositions were imbued with cultural critiques. Trained as both an...
Geomorphology—the study of the evolution and formation of Earth’s topographic and bathymetric features—forms the basis of Andy Moses’ new work at William Turner. Moses has taken his cue for these paintings from the richly complex formations of the Earth’s surface that...
Lita Albuquerque transformed the Orange County community of Laguna Beach in November for the Laguna Art Museum’s (LAM) second annual Art + Nature. This multidisciplinary event/happening/festival showcased Albuquerque, who is known for her ethereal works of art,...
Subscribe to our weekly Gallery Rounds Newsletter for new Reviews, Art opps, Art Events, & More every week!