We generally think of chance or random selection, in opposition to composition, certainly in opposition to mise-en-scène; but there are moments and circumstances that bring these very different conditions into dynamic interplay. I had occasion to consider this...
AI WEIWEI IN LA We haven’t seen much of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei in these parts since LACMA presented his installation “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Head” in 2012. This fall he returned with a well-orchestrated splash—with three high-profile exhibitions opening in LA, all...
The first week of October was Ai Weiwei week in Los Angeles—a triple-header of shows including the Marciano Foundation, the opening show of former MOCA Director Jeffrey Deitch’s new Hollywood gallery, and at the recent UTA gallery in Beverly Hills. First stop was the...
NOTE: Ultimately, the correct response to each of these prompts is one or more paintings. 1. How is a painting different from the screen of your phone? 2 Does the image in a painting end at the edge of the canvas, or continue to infinity? 3. What is a painting? Give...
Writing “It’s beautiful but…” means you’re stupid. Other fields don’t put up with this shit. “Delicious” is no joke: in the 17th century the Dutch and Portuguese went to war over it (Spice War: 1602 to 1663, ended with the Treaty of the Hague). No matter how...
Chances are that if you show a civilian a 500-year-old painting, they won’t be able to name the painter, unless it’s Bosch. His name is even listed as an adjective (“Boschian”) in online slang dictionaries. For somebody who produced fewer than 30 paintings in his...
Roger Herman is a Los Angeles-based artist and professor at UCLA department of art. How long have you been teaching painting at UCLA? Was teaching a profession you wanted to do, or was it a matter of practicality, a way to supplement your income as an artist. I have...
The surrealist impulse in art taps into not merely a human stream of consciousness, but the life and aura of everything around us, from the natural and organic to the built or crafted an inanimate. Nothing is definitively inanimate in the surrealist domain. Warhol saw...
Presenting Euripides’ The Bacchae against the backdrop of the Getty Villa has to be as challenging in sheer existential terms as it is technically to a theatrical artist. It’s a play that addresses both the essential conditions of the theatre and civilization’s...
There is probably no pianist still breathing who hasn’t been fascinated (and perhaps frustrated) by the 1915 Études of Claude Debussy. It’s a foundational suite in several senses. Students of the instrument may initially approach them (or at least the first couple...
JUDY CHICAGO IN PASADENA “If men had babies, there would be thousands of images of the crowning,” Judy Chicago said in the early 1980s. The crowning is the moment the baby’s head begins to emerge from the birth canal. During a packed talk at the Women’s City Club of...
Regular readers might remember a column from a few months ago where I got loud about how publicists are just one more way the art world has found to reward privilege by granting it more privilege so then started a search for the most obscure artist in LA so I could...
President Donald Trump is no fan of the arts. His first budget proposed entirely eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Congress saved both agencies by funding them in the current budget, but their...
I first realized I was an “anarchist”—somebody who doesn’t believe in government—when I first heard the word, probably when I was 11, right around the same time I figured out I was an “artist.” (I didn’t have to look that one up, though I probably should’ve.) I didn’t...
LACMA’s “In the Fields of Empty Days: The Intersection of Past and Present in Iranian Art,” (through Sept. 9) starts with a gallery devoted to Siamak Filizadeh’s digital print series "Underground." This modern-day retelling of the reign of Naser al-Din Shah (r....
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