‘Man proposes, but [God] disposes’—or so went the biblical proverb as distilled more or less through various Christian medieval iterations. In this simultaneously sunlit and dark-star doubling of two operas—George Lewis’s and librettist Douglas Kearney’s dark...
Portraiture has been a constant in art-making since the waning Middle Ages, and really since art first appeared (though they wouldn’t have called it that), which may extend back into prehistory. I would further conjecture that such early art itself encompassed a kind...
At least once a week something happens to save my life. Usually it has something to do with some scientific discovery or biotech breakthrough that has managed to save, preserve or forestall further damage to some part of the biosphere. Or some reminder that nature...
“Where the spent lights quiver and gleam, . . .” Matthew Arnold, “The Foresaken Merman” “ . . . — you can see / the whole sky pass through this head of mine, the...
"I just don't know what to do with myself...." Burt Bacharach / Hal David, 1962 I’m not sure if Barbie is a new kind of cinema, but it’s not the sort of film we’re accustomed to seeing in wide theatrical release on the biggest screens and dressed in the highest of...
I came to this show of Martha Alf’s work as a novice. (I mean that almost reverentially—it’s the sort of work that sends me back to a kind of intellectual nunnery where I feel compelled to repent my inattention and failure to carefully and precisely observe.) Alf’s...
It is one of the great regrets of my life to have never seen Glenda Jackson perform live on stage—and there was at least one serious opportunity that somehow (almost inexplicably) passed me by—in a play I loved, directed by the playwright himself. The play was Edward...
There are two fantastic shows up right now at Marc Selwyn Fine Art in Beverly Hills—both devoted to artists who have some claim to the term, legend—not as an honorific exactly, but simply in terms of the way they have lived their lives—bringing the full scope of their...
Monica may be one of the sparest scripts I have ever seen put to film. The story itself is scarcely more than a classic trope whittled down to its most slender thread—the nostalgia/anti-nostalgia tale filtered through a very specific lens of estrangement. It’s a...
Let me start by just getting a few things off my 28AA chest. I didn’t make it to ANY of the satellite Frieze Projects and am particularly upset about missing at least two of them—specifically Kelly Akashi’s project, Heirloom at the Villa Aurora (last week’s Pick of...
‘People are talking about….’ is the way Vogue used to frame it from the old Diana Vreeland/Leo Lerman days until well into this century. And people have been talking about Yuja Wang’s Rachmaninoff cycle since her marathon performance at Carnegie Hall less than two...
"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned...." W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming Since its inception, Pussy Riot (Nadya Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich, et al.) made the balaclava a trademark, but I...
Okay…so…we get notes. We get feedback. We hear the gossip, the suggestions of angry whispering from one corner or another. First of all– there’s more, there always is; and I’m happy to acknowledge and eager to share it all—or at least as much as I can get down...
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...
We revisit the canonical operatic repertoire for many reasons. And—notions of gesamtkunstwerk to one side—it’s really no different with the Wagnerian repertoire. You could almost attach that description to operas dating from the Baroque. (One might easily make a...
Robert Berman has always understood one essential factor driving the art market—and especially the auction market: the passion of collectors. To hear him tell it, you might think it was his own collector’s passion more than anything else that pushed him into the art...
You don’t need a DSM to figure Adam Greener out, but it can’t hurt. Not to worry—he’s not quite there yet, though there are indications that as post-pubescent hormones flood his bloodstream, he’ll be on his way in no time. Adam is an American student aged about 10...
My early impressions of Claes Oldenburg and his work were shaped largely by mass media. I tended to think of his work in association with Pop artists like Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Rosenquist—though also artists like Allan Kaprow and to a lesser extent, George...
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