On June 19th, 2018, Tumblr user deadbefordeath posted a photograph of a white cat with a confused expression sitting in a chair in front of a plate of vegetables, titling the post "he no like vegetals." According to the Literally Media database, the post gained over...
jill moniz: The Quotidian Blacksmith
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...
Shoptalk
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...
Art Brief
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...
Decoder
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...
SIGHTS UNSCENE
UNDER THE RADAR
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...
Bunker Vision
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...
ASK BABS
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...
WAYS OF NOT SEEING
If, as John Berger writes, “Oil painting… is a celebration of private property”, then Street Art is the equally joyous appreciation of public property. This difference is due to the nature of the work and their contrasting environments: Graffiti beats the streets...
SHOPTALK
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...
SIGHTS UNSCENE
UNDER THE RADAR
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...
DECODER
“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...
BUNKER VISION
“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...
RECONNOITER
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...
HEY MISTER, WANNA BUY A BANKSY?
In May this year, a Millennial identifying himself as the You Tuber Reckless Ben Schneider entered a Los Angeles gallery and told the art dealer there that he had a Banksy painting with him. The LA Art Dealer said he’d like to check it out, so Schneider pulled a...
CURATING THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE
On July 4th, CNN’s website featured photographs of drawings done by several ten-year-old migrant children who had been separated from their parents by US Customs and Border Protection. After their release from CBP, the Catholic Charities Humanitarian Respite Center,...