Archiving cultural ephemera is a tricky business. Anyone who’s followed my writing for even a brief time will have encountered some kind of rant about how the institutional canonization of cultural insurrections like Punk, zine culture, hippies, beats, etc.,—or...
Long films aren’t new. As early as 1914, there was a film (The Photo-Drama of Creation) that ran eight hours. Wikipedia lists at least five films from that decade, which ran at least six hours. In 1971 Jacques Rivette made a famous 13-hour film (Out: One) that had one...
The most famous Hollywood movie I appeared in was Roger Corman's Death Race 2000, which was bizarre because coming from New York, I didn’t know how to drive yet. Over the years the movie became one of the most popular American films in Europe, including France....
ROCK AND ROLL IS FOR THE BIRDSDear Babs, What do you think about using live animals in an artwork? I recently went to a museum in Montreal and witnessed an entire exhibition of finches playing guitars! The air conditioning was blasting and I thought they needed little...
Stephen Cohen is the founder of photo l.a. and the Stephen Cohen Gallery, which is now the Cohen Gallery on Beverly Boulevard in Los Angeles. In January the stalwart photo fair celebrates its 25th anniversary. Artillery: Why did you start photo l.a.? What made...
Happy New Year, dear reader(s). I know I was living up to the blog title just a bit excessively in the last month of this just past year; but I wasn’t just staying at home. First of all, there was Norma – the Los Angeles Opera’s production of Bellini’s classic tale of...
If there was a central flaw or fracture to Karen Finley’s The Jackie Look, it had mostly to do with a lack of clarity of its dramatic objective and trajectory. Finley seemed to be trying to both deconstruct an icon (or more precisely its refractions and reflections in...
There are probably as many words written about the ‘Jackie look’ by now as there are actual images documenting it. A quick scan of just a few of these images taken over the roughly 40 years of her public life reveals quite a range: the young equestrienne, the...
Art does not want us to look at art the way we are asked to look at art. Coming in, worried about making it in time to get to the next gallery and the next, anticipating dinner, standing, not knowing how long the video will go on, not knowing if the next gallery will...
In April I received a catalog for Sotheby’s May 2015 contemporary art auction with a cover image of a cardboard Coca-Cola crate embossed in gold leaf, an artwork created by Danish artist Danh Vo. This untitled 2011 work sold at that auction on May 13 for $466,000. I...
Joanne Heyler is the founding director of The Broad museum and director and chief curator of The Broad Art Foundation. She has been Eli Broad’s principal art advisor for the past 23 years.Artillery: Have you ever disagreed with a purchasing decision, or the final...
The North is very much on our collective minds lately – especially in the wake of recent news that TransCanada has suspended its application procedure to build the 1200-mile Keystone-XL pipeline to transport tar sands-extracted oil across the U.S. Plains states to the...
In many ways, Monday evening’s “Un-Private Collection” panel/conversation at Disney Hall, featuring The Broad Museum’s principal architect, Elizabeth Diller, of the Diller, Scofidio + Renfro firm of architects, and moderated by the distinguished architecture critic,...
With my eyes acting as an open lens, I turn my gaze out onto the world in all its permutations and my mind begins to organize images and methods of articulation.Borderland is an epic painting that concludes almost a year-and-a-half’s work. The images evolve from...
Many collectors are the most influential people you’ve never heard of. Not so Stefan Simchowitz, the art collector who has been dubbed the “art world’s patron Satan” (New York Times Magazine), “the greatest art-flipper of them all” and “a Sith Lord from the...
These statues, never really alive, were visiting the Getty like ghosts from the past, and they have traveled an odd underwater route to get here. Afraid that these magnificent bronzes would be melted down into weaponry and coins, their owners dragged them out to sea...
Agnes Varda is the sort of filmmaker that is always worth paying attention to. According to many film historians, her 1954 film La Pointe Courte was the first French New Wave film. A peek at YouTube reveals a 200-video playlist assembled by obsessed fans. (She gives...
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