The saga of British art dealer Inigo Philbrick is testimony to the pitfalls of the trust and handshake deals that have become customary at the highest levels of the art world. The fall of Philbrick—a protégé of Jay Jopling, the principal of London’s most prestigious...
DECODER
You could draw people in masks. Paint them. Paint on them. Make videos where the face above changes but the mask does not, challenging the viewer to notice and read the eyes, the hairline. You could fashion new masks or sculpt respirators. And the gloves, too:...
ASK BABS
Dear Babs, As an artist practicing social distancing I’ve begun feeling guilty for not doing more with all this new free time. I look on social media and everyone is being so productive, making art, and learning new skills. I’m not making art or much of anything....
BUNKER VISION
If you weren’t around for the 1970s, it’s a hard era to explain. And thanks to AIDS, there are fewer people left alive to explain the queer experience of that decade. Happily, there are movies. The reason that these movies exist is almost accidental. Budding auteurs,...
UNDER THE RADAR
Quarantine isn’t much different from my old normal. In case you hadn’t noticed, this column is 99% reviews of things that I receive through the mail or via the web - anything that doesn’t require me to leave home and interact with my fellow art world and academic...
ROCK STARS
Prior to the arrival of the Spanish in 1771, the Serrano and Paiute indigenous people of Southern California created outdoor parietal rock drawings called petroglyphs in an area of the southern Mojave Desert known as Victor Valley. This once-remote desert is where the...
SHOPTALK April 2020 Edition
Three weeks ago I was visiting LACMA for their landmark exhibition “Where the Truth Lies: The Art of Qiu Ying,” featuring a Ming dynasty painter at the Resnick. Afterwards I came out to look for the plinth where a new Yoshitomo Nara sculpture would be going—the...
Deep Listening By the Light of a “Full Pink Moon”: Opera Povera in Quarantine
The planet, some of us might say, is having a moment. Panic, collapse, disruption—with the tables turned on the principal disrupting species by an errant configuration of protein presumably just doing its thing in the carbon cycle; also course-correction, regrouping,...
BEST OF BUNKER VISION
Since the self-isolation began, I’ve been seeing variations on the joke: “introverts have been preparing for this their whole lives.” One might well surmise that a column about things to watch in your bunker could come in handy about now. Since many of our readers may...
The Obsessive Voice of Reason
Many artists, we’ve been told, are obsessed. The way they repeat a subject, or a theme, their attention to detail or to finish, or just the impressive volume of work they produce, can only be explained by obsession. They think about feet or toast or red a lot—maybe...
Life in the Cracked Lane
Before a few weeks ago, as far as I know, I had never had direct communication with anyone who’d even heard of The Rev. Dr. Fred Lane (though I’m sure some of the LAFMS folk could prove me wrong). Lane hasn’t released anything since 1986 when Shimmy Disc dropped his...
SIGHTS UNSCENE
LABORING
Labor relations are a natural topic for film and documentaries. From the earliest days of cinema, there have been grouchy bosses. The most famous of these might be Michael Moore’s Roger and Me (1989). Strikes always provide a great context to explore the viewpoints of...
Shoptalk
LA Fair Report The fairs are bursting out all over in February—and I just have time to jot down a few notes before deadline. Photo LA (Jan. 30–Feb. 2) is going strong for its second year back on the westside, in the Barker Hangar. This is LA’s longest running fair, in...
ASK BABS The Telephone is Ringing
Dear Babs, I really liked Hans Haacke’s retrospective at The New Museum, specifically his polls that asked viewers their opinions about current news and events. It’s cool he wants his audience to interact with his art. But it got me thinking, why can’t I contact him...
New Column Debut: “Provenance”
Architectural critics have been quick to celebrate midcentury modern architects for their pointed sensitivity to a building’s environs, noting that it was this development more than any other that distinguished California modernism from other modernist movements. But...
Desert XXX
There are plenty of deserts around the world. As President Trump memorably said when he abruptly pulled American troops out of Syria as a favor to the Turkish president Erdogan: “There’s a lot of sand there.” So why is it that Desert X, the organization that has put...