Soft Power is a very timely musical about the uses and misuses of power, a profoundly ambitious satire in which noted playwright David Henry Hwang tries to explain the dismal results of the 2016 elections. Hwang is no shrinking violet when it comes to tough...
When Carmen Argote was 17, her father took off for Guadalajara, Mexico, back to his hometown and his dream of living in a house he had designed for himself and his family. However, his wife felt quite settled in Los Angeles—their two children had grown up here, her...
LOS ANGELES: A FAIR DESTINATION This winter The Other Art Fair (March 15–18) tested its feet in LA waters—launched by Saatchi Art, the online art gallery, the fair is billed as “An Art Fair for a New Generation of Art Buyers.” On the weekend the crowds came in droves...
Laurie Anderson strolled onstage in a flowing orange cloak over black jacket and skinny pants—perhaps a character out of Harry Potter? “I’m sorry I’m wearing my bathrobe,” the multi-media artist quickly apologized as she sat down. “I caught the flu, and I’m still...
In the dystopian future of Wes Anderson’s stop-motion animation Isle of Dogs, Megasaki City is gripped with the panic over the contagious dog flu. The nefarious Mayor Kobayashi (voiced by Kunichi Nomura) exiles all dogs to Trash Island, a place piled with the detritus...
Don Bachardy found his lifelong metier at the movies—he was drawn to the larger-than-life faces on the silver screen, especially those of actresses, and began drawing those faces, copying their likenesses from popular movie magazines. Later, when he moved in with...
Comings and Goings We say farewell to Marc Foxx Gallery on Wilshire Boulevard, in business since 1994. Interestingly, they’re not a victim of the disruptive Metro construction on Wilshire; their building wasn’t effected, but one of the partners, Rodney Nonaka-Hill,...
2017 has been a brilliant year for the movies. And they were good in so many ways, let me try to count them: They offered novel subject matter, woman falls in love with fish-man in The Shape of Water; a despised ex-athlete gets her cinema redemption in I, Tonya; a...
China had its first major avant-garde exhibition in 1989, which was also the year of the Tiananmen protests. The exhibition “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World” (through Jan. 7, 2018) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, acknowledges that sea...
Fair News January is fair month in our fair city. The LA Art Show (Jan. 10–14) in all its massiveness returns to the Convention Center downtown, and Art LA Contemporary (Jan. 25–28) returns to Barker Hangar in Santa Monica. A month later in the nearby low desert is...
Artist Liz Glynn has been taking on increasingly ambitious projects by leaps and bounds, and lately more of it can be seen on the East Coast, where she’s from, than on the West Coast, where she is now based. In early 2017 she had an installation on a corner of Central...
In the new Swedish film The Square directed by Ruben Ostlund, Christian (Claes Bang ) is the hip and handsome chief curator of X-Royal, a major contemporary art museum so-named because it is set in a former royal palace. After being pickpocketed on the street, he does...
BUTTON UP At the opening of “Circles and Circuits” at the Chinese American Museum on Sept. 19, visitors rushing into the show picked up small buttons from the reception desk. Yes, those ubiquitous buttons at PST LA/LA shows, starting with the words “There will be …”...
Half the population of Los Angeles is now Latino, but its signature industry, the film business, fails to include a significant number of Latinos in feature films or deal with stories that may be especially relevant to their lives. This fall the Academy of Motion...
The Red Shoes (1948) is perhaps the most famous dance film of all time. Sumptuously shot in Technicolor and directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger in post World War II England, it was one of those backstage dramas so popular then, when audiences...
PST & NEW ART PRESS OK, Stalwarts, here comes... ARTMAGEDDON 3! That is, Pacific Standard Time LA/LA, with some 70 arts organizations participating, plus about the same number of commercial galleries mounting theme-related shows. The marathon officially gets...
What is Chinatown, and what does it mean to a younger generation who can’t even speak Chinese? The play “King of the Yees” (through August 6) makes an attempt to address that issue, via the story of a father-daughter relationship at the crossroads. It is also about...
Every five years the sedate city of Kassel, Germany, launches an art expo that attempts to capture the zeitgeist of our times, documenta. This 14th edition was an ambitious one, costing over $36 million, with one part opening in Athens, Greece, in April (ending July...
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