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...
China: Lin Tianmiao
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...
Blur and Conquer
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...
ASK BABS
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...
BUNKER VISION
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...
Bruce Davidson & Paul Caponigro
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...
Robert Frank in America
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...
ART BRIEF
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...
CURFEW
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,...
DECODER
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...
UNDER THE RADAR: Joyous Anarchy
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...
SHOPTALK
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...
MIAMI REPORT: Stopping Traffic
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...
MarJorie Cameron at MOCA PDC
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...
LONDON CALLING
London is one of the world’s leading centers for contemporary art and also has a history that reaches back beyond Roman times. It’s a place of contradictions, home to great financial and cultural institutions, fine universities and wonderful buildings, as well as to a...
RETROSPECT
It seems the art critics think Andy Warhol’s Shadows painting (1978-79) at MOCA is the worst he has ever done—meaningless disco junk! One has to ask, if it is so terrible why would such a smart artist need 102 canvases to complete the series? Warhol himself called the...
The Rauschenberg Foundation’s Expanding Vision
If you follow current art world news, no doubt you’ve noticed the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation popping up more frequently. Two of their initiatives, the Emerging Curator Competition and the Artist as Activist grant program opened for submissions in September and...
The Permeability of the (Art) World
Art Basel is a world unto itself; as the 13th year of the art fair rolled through Miami in early December to strong sales, completing a re-bound from the 2008 market drop, its massive influx of cash, glamour, international speculators and celebrity have triumphantly...