I’m often asked which artist or artists interest me the most, or some variation of the question. For the last year-and-a-half since I saw her work in “Un/Common Proximity,” a group show at James Cohan in New York, my response has been Allana Clarke. Before this show,...
The dolls we grew up playing with weren’t just dolls—they were alter egos, surrogate friends and family, and sometimes even symbolic forces of the universe. In this beautifully designed book, Betye Saar: Black Doll Blues, we get a chance to look at Saar’s special...
Hello, Good-Bye: New Year for Hammer Museum Was 2022 a blur? It feels like it went by very quickly, too quickly, as we transitioned into the New Normal. People have returned to indoor dining, theaters are open and museums and art fairs are back—though some museums...
Jeffrey Vallance holds a unique position in the LA art world. A contemporary of Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Jim Shaw, et al, his work has had a comparable impact locally and internationally, while not transitioning to the industrial fabrication mode demanded by the...
One half of Chicago’s famous corn cob buildings, formally known as Marina City, floats above a winding road in a mountain pass. It pierces a white void, which highlights the building’s delicate edges, the bite marks in its ocular facade. Below, light streams through...
A bomb explodes in one of the Met’s galleries leaving 13-year-old Theo motherless in the harrowing opening of Donna Tartt’s 2013 bestselling novel, The Goldfinch. In the wake of the explosion, caused by an apparent terrorist attack, a mysterious survivor prompts Theo...
I have a friend who, for the most part, paints abstract paintings. We were talking on the couch the other week about this period where she had started making not-abstract paintings. She had painted paintings with images of recognizable things, with words, with clear...
Alt Coins, Bear Market, Crypto Winter, Down Bad, Expected Returns, FTX Fraud, Government Oversight, Hacked ($477M), Insolvent, JPEGs, KYC, Liquidity Gone, Margin Trading; I could easily go through the whole alphabet alluding to the current crypto market conditions,...
One of the very positive effects of MTV and YouTube is the restoration of demand for short films. Early cinema consisted mostly of short films. Auteurs of early cinema managed to pack a lot of plot into films that ran 20 minutes or less. MTV also inspired a lot of...
Thrift stores are potentially the end of the line for any object on sale therein; after that, it’s either ref-use or reuse. Consequently, there’s a poignancy to the purchase of any artwork from a thrift store, whether by an ironic hipster being or a sincere abuelita....
Dear Babs, One of my greatest music heroes recently started painting. So when a local gallery showed his art in a pop-up show, I was excited to go. But his paintings are really not good. He’s had a very long career as a musician and always puts a ton of effort into...
No One Loves Me Like You Do A soft and rotten moment of loving you hits the pavement like seasonal fruit gone overripe. Skipping to the part where you leave a cigarette burning in my ashtray, I take out eyes swollen by another’s prying that pass through the mouth and...
There has never been a year in Los Angeles—certainly not in this century, more probably the last 30 years—when our artists haven’t delivered something surprising, extraordinary, something to change the way we talk and think about and look at the world. This year was...
It’s that time of year again, when the mistletoe has wilted and bedraggled Christmas trees line the city streets, slumped against dumpsters like drunken sailors. It’s that time of year when Resolute Red makes BIG plans, none of which will ever be realized, but it’s...
Immersive and sensual, the richly floral images of Gary Brewer’s “Voluptuous Charm of the Monumental Image” is a kaleidoscope of color and form. These are works bursting with life, subtly O’Keefe-like—though still uniquely Brewer—evoking the mysteries of nature, the...
In the late winter of 2019, I became enamored with Joan Didion. I and my then partner were driving the backroads of Tennessee and North Carolina as a leg of a cross country move from Portland to Philadelphia. Somewhere along our trip I picked up a copy of South and...
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