Sean Tejaratchi is a taxonomic guerrilla and semiotic hoarder. His social media phenomenon (and book) Liartown generated a tsunami of WTF memes, that have been described as “layered, multivalent detournees of the entire gamut of visual culture from the last century...
jill moniz has been a curator at the California African American Museum (CAAM) and is now principal of her own downtown gallery, Quotidian. She curated the current exhibition “LA Blacksmith” at CAAM. I understand that you have a PhD in cultural anthropology—how and...
Go Directly to Go The fall art season has taken off like a steeplechase, with so many openings on the weekends that one can take in barely a fraction of them. In addition to the shows at galleries and museums (Lari Pittman at the Hammer and Echiko Ohira at Craft...
In September during a visit to Paris, I got lost in the Louvre, a common occurrence caused by its diabolical mazelike layout (maps are useless) and I found myself in the museum’s Oriental Antiquities wing. After viewing hundreds of paintings in the French and Italian...
Everything about the way we talk about art in public is vestigial, left over from the birth of print. Once upon a time this conversation was done entirely with ink: ink was expensive, photographs of art were more expensive and photos in color were even more expensive...
You always hear about how we’re living in a golden age of TV, but you rarely hear the same thing about comic books. Which is weird, since comic books have taken over the film industry, further fueling the current golden age of TV. But far below the Olympian economics...
Shortly after I installed the YouTube channel, I found my official “sport.” I went for weeks not knowing what this wonderful thing that I was watching was called. Even though I had seen Paris is Burning and watched a season of Pose, I didn’t immediately make the...
DEAR BABS: "I’ve been an artist for a long time and I want to get rid of my old art. I don’t want it anymore and I don’t want to try and sell it, but I feel bad just throwing it in the dumpster. What’s the best way to get rid of my art?” Bernard, Los Angeles Dear...
Tarry Nights at LACMA It’s summer, but the traffic is as bad as ever, and the art world continues to percolate. Yours Truly recently came upon an evening concert at LACMA which was jam-packed from the stage at BP Plaza to where the museum conjoins with La Brea...
Perhaps the best-known configuration of the ever-shifting alliances within the legendary Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS) is the art-noise supergroup Extended Organ (XO). There’s some irony in this—apart from the very concept of an art noise supergroup—in the...
“The only principle in art is balance,” this was my high school art teacher and she was great—but that was hack advice. If you’re trying to realistically draw a chair (which we were always trying to do in high school) you can make the legs too long or make them too...
“I am a wound and a sword, a victim and an executioner” are the first words that appear on the screen. A tender love scene follows, filmed in extreme close-up, that might have come from any black-and-white European art film of the 1960s. As the camera pulls back and...
Felicia Filer is the Public Art Division Director at the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. DCA is committed to the creation and maintenance of art in the Public Works Improvements Arts Program, the Private Arts Development Fee Program, the Citywide...
Artificial Intelligence Gets Uppity The future is closer than we think. Yours Truly has been binge-watching the series Humans on Amazon Prime, which has a remarkable cast playing “Synths,” or Synthetics, in a future-world where AI androids take over the menial and...
The Me Too movement has pushed the private behavior of artists and performers into the public square. Accusations of sexual harassment have damaged the reputations of dozens of artistic figures from Chuck Close to Kevin Spacey. The question is whether these...
If you’ve been following my recent columns here, you’ll know I’ve been on a bit of an ’80s counter-nostalgia binge, looking at an alternate history to the period, conjured from the last dregs of genuine counterculture before techno, grunge and the internet came to...
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