So I was making the usual—you know: one part cherry juice, one part club soda, two parts peach juice—and thinking about how artists are eccentric. Balzac supposedly drank 50 cups of coffee a day, Grant Wood replaced his door with a coffin lid, and Paolo Uccello would...
Eccentricity Isn’t Diversity
Shoptalk Art fairs and COVID, Desert X
Art Fairs Aren't Giving Up Delays, delays, and more delays. Last year Art Basel rather optimistically thought it would proceed with its Miami edition in December. That was finally cancelled when they came to their senses. I think there were online viewing rooms and...
SIGHTS UNSCENE Scene from Frieze LA, Paramount Studios, Los Angeles, 2020
PROVENANCE The City of Tomorrow, Today
In a 1953 photograph for a spread in LIFE magazine on LA County’s city of Lakewood, a bird’s-eye view looks down onto a newly paved suburban street. The street is lined with moving trucks as far as the eye can see as family after family busily unpack their belongings....
BUNKER VISION Size Matters
The pandemic has brought many issues to the fore, including health care, basic income and housing. Further down the list (but inspiring outsize passion) is how we consume movies. After nearly a year without much production and very few theaters allowed to remain open,...
ASK BABS ART CONSCIOUS
Dear Babs, Desert X is putting their show on in the Coachella Valley this spring, after art-washing the murderous Saudi Arabian regime with a big outdoor show over there. In case you missed it, Saudi leader MBS had Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi killed and...
Reconnoiter: Jonathan Hepfer Interview with the percussionist, conductor, and artistic director
Jonathan Hepfer is a percussionist, conductor, and the artistic director of Monday Evening Concerts, the longest-running classical, avant-garde and experimental music concert series in LA. What has it been like reimagining your programming during the pandemic? Over...
Remarks on Color: Peacock Blue March's Hue
Peacock Blue wishes to clarify once and for all that her name has little to do with vegetable matter and even less with genitalia, yet imagine going through life mistaken either for soup or a pecker! Such is the fate of Peacock Blue, who’s spent a lifetime in the jest...
Remarks on Color: Seahorse Yellow February's Hue
This oceanic equine has been spotted in the mangrove forests of South America, sporting a spiny suit of luminous flames – a dapper, irreverent fellow who reads Rilke, Proust and Rimbaud, albeit, soggy in the shallows – he is the avatar of things to come, the...
Remarks on Color: Khaki Green January's Hue
Khaki Green loves to talk. Her friends call her “Yacky Khaki,” and sometimes when they’re feeling annoyed, “Quacky Khaki.” But really, it’s a compulsion as at 5 AM every morning Khaki Green begins her rants – everything from contesting this year’s champion at the...
SHOPTALK SoCal Museum News, Pantone Color of the Year, and more.
SoCal’s Museums Museums have been shut down (again), which doesn’t effect the city of Los Angeles too much as museums weren’t reopened except for a very short week or so. Neither LACMA nor the Hammer ever reopened after mid-March shutdowns and, alas, the...
Art Brief The Art World Gets Woke, Part II
In last issue’s column I discussed the influence of the Woke movement in shaking up stodgy art museums to diversify their staff and fill gaps in their collections caused by decades of turning a blind eye to artwork made by minorities and women. Sure enough, a backlash...
SIGHTS UNSCENE Take Your Temp?
Fake Nudes Alison Jackson’s “Truth is Dead”
Artists can make the invisible become visible, but that doesn’t mean they have to. Photographers in particular find it necessary to provide visual confirmation of a chosen moment; in the case of some Pulitzer Prize winners, their captured image has become the official...
Bunker Vision Spooked
Fifty years ago, when the Manson murders were daily headline news, the reporting emphasized anything that might pass for “hippie behavior,” while playing down Manson’s intended goal to start a race war. The dog-whistling, race-based law and order tropes of politicians...
ASK BABS Turn A Blind Eye
Dear Babs, I’m a young artist a few years out of grad school. Recently my dad’s close friend asked if he could buy a painting I made about America’s racist prison industrial complex. In the spirit of transparency, he told me he planned to give it as a gift to an old...
Reconnoiter: Kevin Duffy
Kevin Duffy is an LA-based actor, filmmaker and writer, who recently performed in Refracted Theater Company’s Homeless Garden—a reimagination of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard set in present-day where climate change and politics coincide. The play was performed...
Christmas in the Bunker Free Movies to Hunker Down with during the Holidays
CHRISTMAS IN THE BUNKER With the idea that many readers will be in bunker mode during the holidays, I have rounded up a variety of things that you can watch for free with an internet connection. Some of these were covered in previous dispatches, and some of them are...