Entre le coucher de soleil et le clair de lune, les feux d’artifice nous appellent encore. There is something tragic about the decline of a great operatic voice. It’s a tragedy that encompasses all the smaller tragedies of decline – including our own individually...
A little more than 40 years ago, I was home from school and living in an apartment in Westwood. I didn’t see my brother – who was also in Los Angeles that summer, freshly graduated from Yale – very often; but when I did or when we spoke over the phone, we would...
As we move forward into 2018, we recognize a bit more concretely how our experiences in 2017 and immediately prior influenced and began to reshape our perception of the larger (and certainly the political) world. This is nothing new. Radical cultural change (or its...
Picasso knew what he was up against – literally. He pasted it into his art, more or less inventing collage in the process. He (along with a few of his other Cubist colleagues) also played with trompe l’oeil, but he understood this wasn’t the same thing – a device...
I’ve always thought the human preoccupation with borders and perimeters had more to do with its relationship with animal wildlife (not that humans have ever exactly been ‘tame’). I realize I’m speaking a bit off the top of my head – I’ve never done any serious...
I’m thinking about family albums right now – not something that comes to mind very often (and now I’m wondering if this is the first time I’ve ever considered this). I suppose this could also be something captured and stored digitally – but for some reason, it doesn’t...
What are the contours of gender? Is there a range of conditions that determine gender along a curve or spectrum we can visualize or somehow represent, measure or analyze? Is there a focal point we can identify that will turn it in one direction or another? Most of us...
So I was on the phone with my pal Mary the other day and we were talking about how, between our respective work deadlines and obligations, and taking care of our quadruped loved ones, we essentially never went out anymore. “I mean it’s not as if we’ll ever catch up on...
I walked into the Resnick Pavilion and into the swirling world of color and fantasy that Marc Chagall created for the theatre and remembered again what made me want to live. Much of the work exhibited in this show was actually made in New York. But it’s...
As noted in an Artillery Pick quite recently, portraiture is the oldest form of ‘identity art’, and moreover, representation itself. It is ‘naming’ in the largest sense – placing, identifying, classifying, narrating, and implicitly conceptualizing, though without...
We read history for perspective on advancing and collapsing civilizations and their impacts on planetary life and (hopefully) an understanding of historical cycles and a sense of where we might all be headed (besides other planets). Art exhibitions, historical and...
The title of the show is as ironic as it is aspirational. Most of us find ourselves in a place far more culturally fractured than we imagined less than a year ago, and pressing forward into an ever-more dystopian reality. Which is why it is as important as ever to...
Not more than a year ago, I was writing about a show at LACMA with a transcendental dimension – not merely transcending its materials, approach and style, but whose visionary qualities might potentially carry the dedicated viewer to a place of transcendence. Only a...
Are you one of those people who have difficulty making clear-cut distinctions between your night(or day)mares and the actuality of your everyday life? (I am – especially when I’m running a fever.) Jim Shaw not only gets you; he’s created a sacred space for your...
The subject of appearances and disappearances is not new to Edgar Arceneaux – in fact it might be considered a through-line in his work over the years. But Arceneaux is always acutely conscious of the sea-changes of time and history and the chain of causality...
Kerry James Marshall’s current retrospective at MoCA is less a ‘Pick-of-the-Week’ than a Must of the Year. Regardless of the particulars of each individual’s experience, it is a show that compels serious reevaluation of the historical canon of Western painting (and...
Young Caesar is born of a certain moment – a definably Californian, forward- and global-looking moment. In Lou Harrison’s music and the awkwardly framed conceits of its libretto by Robert Gordon, there is yearning, rather than the ‘ambition’ we might associate with...
Periodically, we hear complaints (or alternatively, sighs of gratitude) from one quarter or another that painting is dead; or sometimes more specifically, that abstract painting is dead. At this point it’s far more likely the planet will die before abstract painting....
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