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...
To see the Goddess Durga Slaying the Demon Buffalo Mahisha you take the green train in Manhattan to the most boring neighborhood during the most boring part of the day, wait in one to three lines and pay what you wish. Take the big steps up over the Celtic art, take a...
In 2012 a YouTube user named Sabine started uploading a film in 10-minute segments. The story went that while on a visit to North Korea, a dissident had slipped Sabine a DVD of a propaganda movie that was showing on North Korean state television. The idea of such a...
In order to kill time while waiting for John Waters to take the stage for a Conversation to celebrate the publication of his new book, Mr. Know-It-All, at the Renberg Theatre in Hollywood, I made the mistake of checking my phone. One email awaited me. It was from a...
NEW FAIRS IN TOWN, PART 2 I don’t know about you, but Yours Truly is still recovering from our robust art fair season, when for one weekend in February we had five fairs bubbling up around the city. Seeing wonderful work was bliss, driving through traffic in the rain...
On February 15, 2019, President Donald Trump issued a fake declaration of a national emergency at the southern border of the U.S., claiming that criminals and drugs were infiltrating into the country at record levels—a blatant lie. In fact, illegal border crossings...
Eighties nostalgia is a sad and sick thing. In Dazed and Confused, Richard Linklater’s early-’90s exercise in ’70s nostalgia, the character Cynthia (played by Beck’s future wife!) explains her Every Other Decade theory thusly: “The ’50s were boring. The ’60s rocked....
The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says...
You know the photo. Times Square. 1945. V-Day. A male sailor hugging and kissing a female nurse in fervent joy over the end of World War II. An immense sculpture of the kiss seen ‘round the world, Unconditional Surrender, would later settle in Sarasota, Florida. In...
Ron Ormond is not the sort of filmmaker who usually gets prestigious restorations. His most famous work was a series of Lash LaRue films. He made forgettable low budget films and produced roller derby for television in the 1960s. When he grew tired of that, he started...
DEAR BABS: If an artist wants to make a work of art, say put something up in public, or appropriate an image, or orchestrate a prank, or just... ya know... do something that’s likely to draw attention from the police, what should they do if they need legal advice?...
Double Horizon takes its title from Lia Halloran’s three-channel video installation composed from documentation of roughly thirty flights the artist made in the course of her training in air piloting and navigation and early aviation experiences over the greater Los...
Lars Jan’s staging of The White Album has returned to Los Angeles; and suddenly I feel drawn back to 1969, a year that was in a sense my first real introduction to Los Angeles as three things simultaneously: a place (its suburban and studio/dream factory aspects clear...
I confess that I’m not sure why I particularly care, or at what point I might have begun to see this as something larger than simply the loss of a theatre or auditorium space (i.e., LACMA’s Bing Theatre, which was a part of the original LACMA complex), or the razing...
I didn’t have the opportunity to see Carrie Mae Weems’ Guggenheim retrospective last year, but I was vaguely aware that she had taken advantage of the occasion (and location) to create something of a forum for conversation—both around the exhibited work and presumably...
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