Portraiture has been a constant in art-making since the waning Middle Ages, and really since art first appeared (though they wouldn’t have called it that), which may extend back into prehistory. I would further conjecture that such early art itself encompassed a kind...
It’s no secret, Gerald Ford could throw, and his famed football remembers him fondly, so singular and ever so brown, careening across the Michigan sky. He ran the country the way he assembled the field—one play at a time and always with the endgame in mind, but his...
At least once a week something happens to save my life. Usually it has something to do with some scientific discovery or biotech breakthrough that has managed to save, preserve or forestall further damage to some part of the biosphere. Or some reminder that nature...
Stove Pipe Black has been known to be quite presidential. A lofty, serious shade, yet with an air of whimsy skirting the edges. Jet black is for racing cars and black pearl possesses a hint of green that can sometimes be found on iguanas, but Stove Pipe Black can be...
The 2022–23 term has been a disaster for the US Supreme Court. Chief Justice John Roberts, Jr. disgraced himself by spurning demands from Congress and the public that the Court adopt a code of ethics similar to the one covering all other federal jurists. If such...
Memory is a funny thing. Do you remember skinning your knee when you were a kid, or do you just look down at the scar and think of the stories you’ve heard? As you drive down the first street you lived on, do you remember the market on the corner where you would get...
Dear Babs, I’m a mid-career painter who’s carved out a decent professional career. I’m not famous, and frankly, I don’t want to be. My problem is that I have a unique name I thought would never be confused with another artist. Recently another, young painter with my...
“Where the spent lights quiver and gleam, . . .” Matthew Arnold, “The Foresaken Merman” “ . . . — you can see / the whole sky pass through this head of mine, the...
"I just don't know what to do with myself...." Burt Bacharach / Hal David, 1962 I’m not sure if Barbie is a new kind of cinema, but it’s not the sort of film we’re accustomed to seeing in wide theatrical release on the biggest screens and dressed in the highest of...
Maladjusted Magenta is a card-carrying malefactor, having graduated from the school of malefactions for the perpetually maleficent. Maladapted and malcontent, Maladjusted Magenta is both a true malcontent as well as an expert on all things malodorous—from rotten eggs...
I came to this show of Martha Alf’s work as a novice. (I mean that almost reverentially—it’s the sort of work that sends me back to a kind of intellectual nunnery where I feel compelled to repent my inattention and failure to carefully and precisely observe.) Alf’s...
The US Copyright Office issued a landmark ruling in February that users of AI-generative programs may not apply for copyright registration of the resultant images. Additionally, the company that owns the AI-image-generative program Midjourney was sued in federal court...
Dear Babs, My friend recently inherited some African and Native American masks from her uncle and is concerned with talk in the news about demands for museums to return items to their indigenous owners/countries of origin. She doesn’t think the masks are looted and...
It is one of the great regrets of my life to have never seen Glenda Jackson perform live on stage—and there was at least one serious opportunity that somehow (almost inexplicably) passed me by—in a play I loved, directed by the playwright himself. The play was Edward...
The end of the world is upon us, according to Apocalyptic Apricot, whose outlook on life has been called bleak, grim, dreary, hopeless and downright cataclysmic. Proceeding from the standpoint that the entire planet is doomed and that if there is any “goodness” left...
There are two fantastic shows up right now at Marc Selwyn Fine Art in Beverly Hills—both devoted to artists who have some claim to the term, legend—not as an honorific exactly, but simply in terms of the way they have lived their lives—bringing the full scope of their...
Monica may be one of the sparest scripts I have ever seen put to film. The story itself is scarcely more than a classic trope whittled down to its most slender thread—the nostalgia/anti-nostalgia tale filtered through a very specific lens of estrangement. It’s a...
The Hermès Birkin handbag is the stuff of legend. Named for actress Jane Birkin, each bag is hand-tooled in the finest leather or crocodile. The bags are highly sought out by the nouveau riche. Customers for new releases are placed on a waiting list and there is a...
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