NEW MUSEUM IN TOWN Welcome Marciano Art Foundation on Wilshire Boulevard! It’s the new museum that features the contemporary art collection of Paul and Maurice Marciano, two of the brothers who founded the hip jeans company Guess and became zillionaires. The museum...
Young Caesar is born of a certain moment – a definably Californian, forward- and global-looking moment. In Lou Harrison’s music and the awkwardly framed conceits of its libretto by Robert Gordon, there is yearning, rather than the ‘ambition’ we might associate with...
The art world is in a genteel panic—reliable work isn’t selling, galleries are moving and closing, Andrea Rosen has said she’ll no longer represent living artists. It’s not that the artists have become any less imaginative or capable, it’s economics: Donald Trump has...
Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts Eight recipients have just been named by the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts to receive their Artist Project Grants, totaling a hefty $319,000. The fortunate ones—Human Resources/356 S. Mission Rd.; The Industry; La Plaza de...
President Trump’s proposed plan for a $54 billion increase in the defense budget would be paid for by drastically cutting many agency budgets, including the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) with its relatively modest annual budget of...
The He-Man Action Movie Appreciation Society meets regularly to interrogate promising high-budget mainstream shoot-’em-ups in the context for which they were designed—big, loud movie theaters. The Society’s inaugural screening resulted in my report “Is Jason Bourne a...
Yes sir, every Saturday, the Post magazine would come to our door and I would squeal silently with delight because on the cover was yet another Norman Rockwell painting and I got what the painting was saying. It was funny, but not like a Dick Tracy cartoon: It was...
One of the best ways to gauge how the mainstream views artists is by looking at the movies. Before people associated artists with money, artists were an exotic species. If an artist had any degree of success, they were a newspaper illustrator, or had a job with an ad...
“Home exterior decorating tips: What to do with excess plastic toy trash!”
In the 1980s, Pam and Steve Nagler founded the performance ensemble Shrimps, which toured nationally and performed locally at venues like LACE. Over the years Shrimps’ iterations included Martin Kersels, Weba Garretson and Ryan Hill. The couple recently retired from...
It says something that you need not one, but two actors to play Norman Mailer in a performance that places him at the center of a cultural moment he could hardly have held without the connivance of a media machinery he had masterfully charmed and manipulated for...
LOOK FOR SPECIAL EDITION POSTCARDS BY SUSAN SILTON INSIDE OUR MARCH/APRIL 2017 ISSUE Susan Silton, Delivery Systems, 2017 A special edition for Artillery consisting of eight inserted postcards addressed to current U.S. Supreme Court Justices. Los Angeles–based...
If you ever said fine art was a political act, you were wrong. Consciousness-raising—as art’s broad project, as an abstraction somehow implied in the diversions and ironies of what is done in galleries—did not work. Or, as a press release might put it: received...
Melbourne street artist Ms Saffaa painted and wheat-postered a wall with a Muslim feminist protest mural. The collage of Saudi artists and activists shared the space with pink Arabic reading: “radical Muslim.” It took over 80 hours to complete—and one night for...
When I first saw a reproduction of The Bedroom I thought, Oh my God, this guy has so few clothes. Later I altered my assessment of the painting and thought how cool to cut out all the crap in your life and just have a few necessities so you could concentrate on what’s...
Trying to actually define The Situationists is a slippery business. The more people who weigh in on what they were about, the more confusing it becomes. As an official art movement, Situationism existed from 1957 to 1972. They are considered a missing link between...
SHOULD I STAY OR SHOULD I GO Dear Babs, I’m thinking about leaving the U.S. and moving to Berlin because this country is about to explode and also because everyone says Berlin is better for artists. Is this true? How would I go about making this move? —Thomas Newton,...
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