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...
Feminism is an ideology that powers political and social movements dedicated to establishing gender equality between men and women. As such, it serves as inspiration for artistic exploration of the various issues involved in that process. First-generation feminist...
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...
There’s a pair of wonderful lines somewhere near the opening of Stephen Sondheim’s decades old musical, Pacific Overtures that introduce and contextualize much of the drama that follows; and also, in typical Sondheim fashion, open our eyes to another world—not simply...
Photo LA & LA Art Show Our eyeballs may fall out, there’s so very much to see with this cornucopia of art fairs in SoCal this winter. It started with Photo LA (Jan. 31–Feb. 3) returning after a year-hiatus and leaving the cramped Reef/LA Mart downtown for the...
In Branden W. Joseph’s book, Beyond the Dream Syndicate: Tony Conrad and the Arts After Cage, Joseph precipitates his excursion into the minutiae of the early ’60s New York City avant-garde on Mike Kelley’s concept-like-thing of Minor Histories—a sort of...
“Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World”—intended to be the most important show of Chinese dissident art in recent years—limped into California late last year. The show traveled to the Guggenheim Museums in Bilbao, Spain and New York before its display at the...
If you’ve been to a museum lately you’ve noticed all the not-art. The artist’s notebook, the artist’s ticket to Switzerland, the fragment of the stage still containing the burn-mark from the performance, the suit the artist wore during the performance, the chart the...
Leaving my converted-garage AirBnb near Little Havana, I was charmed to find the walkway was blocked by wheat posters and spray cans. It was 9 a.m. on the second day of Art Basel Miami Beach and artist Fiest was putting the finishing sprays on a series of his RIP LOVE...
If you have any awareness of the New York underground, you have probably encountered the name Penny Arcade. Her resume is so diverse, that until she finishes her autobiography, it will be hard to comprehend the breadth of her activities. Those activities include...
In 2016, Los Angeles-based multimedia artist Kim SchoeNstadt launched her “Now Be Here” project in Los Angeles where 733 contemporary women artists gathered for a group photo at Hauser & Wirth. Tell me about how you started the project, Now Be Here. Hauser Wirth...
There aren’t too many equalizers in today’s stratified society; in fact, one can say that the act of waiting is the only inconvenience that’s shared by everyone, rich and famous, or poor and anonymous. Consider a traffic jam on the Santa Monica Freeway; the CEO in the...
LA ARTS DISTRICT SANS ARTISTS LA, LA, our art scene is changing so rapidly. On a recent visit to the Arts District for a preview at Hauser & Wirth, I was struck by how tidy the neighborhood is looking these days. When that gallery opened two-and-a-half years ago,...
The bitter years-long dispute between billionaire Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev and Swiss art-freeport mogul Yves Bouvier (reported in this column previously) has spawned a multi-million-dollar lawsuit against Sotheby’s and has resulted in possible criminal...
It’s been getting harder to tell the difference between weird and normal lately. Case in point: the current flurry of activity documenting the burgeoning interest in an obscure sub-genre of lounge music, known as “Library” or “Production” music. In many ways, the...
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