Dear Readers,Lately I’ve been getting wistful for the past. It’s not that I want to go back, never to return. It’s more that I yearn for more simple and innocent times; I’m not sure I prefer wisdom to naiveté.It’s the direction art has been going that has made me...
Upsize, supersize, largesize, megasize—there are most likely a dozen more of these contemporarily fabricated verbs that are necessitated by our want/need to consume at the current unprecedented rates. The commerce-based art world, not unlike the modern fast-food...
One artist who is returning to his roots after spending the last several years working on massive projects is sculptor Charles Long. For his next major exhibition “Up Land,” at his gallery Tanya Bonakdar in Chelsea, Long is embracing his personal style of hands-on...
The residential valley neighborhood wasn’t what I was expecting when I went to Chas Smith’s studio for our interview. Big shade trees lined the wide boulevards of modest houses and neat lawns. Smith has been Paul McCarthy’s main art assistant for over a decade, and...
Up-and-coming Los Angeles-based artist Christian Tedeschi describes his former boss, Nancy Rubins as “a tornado—so much energy.” The 40-year-old assistant professor and head of sculpture at Cal State Northridge recalls his experience as a studio assistant with a...
Many young artists, especially those coming right out of school, find working as a studio assistant to be a valuable intermediary step. If they are lucky, they learn practical skills—and perhaps even more importantly—they make significant connections with more...
Yes, Shepard Fairey is a street art superstar, a highly collectible blue-chip artist, and a household name worthy of museum retrospectives. Fairey’s also a multiple-city muralist, a curator of talent with his own Subliminal Gallery and most recently a co-producer of...
Unbeknownst to many, the majority of sculptors that are known for creating large sculptures in bronze, never actually work with the material. Rather they sculpt in some alternative natural—such as clay or wax—then when the final aesthetic is reached, the object is...
Climate experts have yet to advance their science to a point where we might seriously contemplate climate management, but if they ever do, they might find the curatorial method of “Made in L.A. 2014” instructive. This more sharply focused edition of the Hammer...
Until his suicide in 1995, Ray Johnson was one of those fringe artists that most artists had heard about, but very few were familiar with. Even then, it wasn’t until John Walter’s 2002 biopic How to Draw a Bunny—certainly one of the best biographical art documentaries...
If you asked beginning art students to name a living artist in 1998, the most frequent reply would be Thomas Kinkade. Given the art world’s fascination with popularity and money, this is hardly surprising. By this point in his career many upscale malls had galleries...
The inclusion of Emil Nolde in the excellent exhibition, “Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is a brilliant decision, though Nolde was not known for joining groups for very long. Many of his...
I attended the opening of a show of the recent work of David Hockney at the L.A. Louver gallery titled “The Arrival of Spring.” These colorful prints of the East Yorkshire English landscape were composed by Hockney on his iPad with an app that allowed him to create...
There are artists for whom the process of making art has become primarily a lucrative business: the brands of Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst come to mind. Collectors and galleries make demands for signature work, and artists may reach a certain point where they delegate...
Five years ago, when news spread that Harmony Korine was shooting a feature on VHS, it was hailed as an ingenious use of a retro technology. More recently, the band Prodigy was lauded for shooting a music video on VHS. Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel, 21 Grams)...
BOON OR BUSTPost Rail Plan on Wrong Track at Bergamot “They’re basically destroying Bergamot Station,” says Wayne Blank, who holds the master lease on the galleries and art institutions at the Bergamot Station arts complex. (He’s also the “Wayne” of Shoshana Wayne...
John Altoon couples his relaxed, entirely convincing painterly hand with a flippant disregard for norms whether social, societal or artistic. His retrospective at LACMA cavorts, galumphs and saunters through a wide variety of styles, approaches and modes of...
In much the same way Chris Burden imbues his visual vernacular with his own brand of personal/social provocation, Sean Duffy, in his newest exhibition, aptly titled “Paintings,” at Susanne Vielmetter, shatters the expectation of the pristine sacred surface, electing...
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