Thirsty and SoberDear Babs, I’m an artist. I want to succeed. I don’t drink. I’m in AA. Every art opening I go to has booze. What do I do? —Nick, Los AngelesDear Nick, Drink water.Pretty BabyDear Babs, It seems like you have to be beautiful to be a successful young...
The Broad Is Here Inaugural Show is a Highlights Survey Here comes The Broad! The striking white cube with diagonal perforations holding the contemporary art collection of Eli and Edythe Broad finally opened to the public on Sept. 20—after a delay of nearly a year due...
It is that most fundamental of human needs – our need to make sense of things, to report, describe and explain the world; which itself may be at the core of our social and cultural needs, perhaps the basis of society and culture – the need to bring order to our lives...
The weather may be catastrophically portentous in Los Angeles; but, absent a 9 or 10 Richter scale earthquake or a tsunami that drags Santa Monica out into the Pacific, the show must go on (hey this used to be Hollywood). You may or may not be going out to see and...
There was astonishing buzz around Philippe Quesne’s La Mélancolie des Dragons at REDCAT last Wednesday night; and as a sucker for avant-garde theatre, I simply had to be there, heat or no heat. I felt cooler just looking at the stage set, which resembled a forest...
The L.A. art industry never rests (as if awol ever needed proof of that!); but tradition dies hard, and art galleries and museums break out the new season alongside other arts and cultural venues. Matthew Barney had already screened his not-so-new (2014 – and six...
<p>For many of us in Los Angeles glued to a screen as a ferociously hot Tuesday afternoon faded with an exhausted sigh into a still intolerably warm Tuesday evening, possibly toggling between one task and another as <strong>Venus</strong>...
At the Yale School of Painting and Printmaking there is a pit. They called it a pit. There were discussions in the pit and they were twice a year, about you, and mandatory.Some people cried in the pit. They wept because the artist-professors said they held low...
Given the conflation of mid-century modernist furniture design and improvised experimental music on invented instruments, I’m probably remembering correctly that it was Steve Roden who told me about Harry Bertoia’s “Sonambient” sculptures and self-released LPs, one of...
In May of this year, headlines trumpeted that the contemporary art auctions in New York hit a new record of over $1.2 billion in sales for the major auction houses. There’s no doubt that a fair number of sellers of these marquee art works were California residents....
School—the word alone makes me shiver. I was forced to go when I was five. “Forced” is an ugly, ugly word but sometimes it turns out for the better. In the ’50s I attended an all-girls school that focused on posture, a good translation of Cicero, and the perfect...
Got Talent?Dear Babs, I painted this one week in 1969 and have barely lifted a brush since. Should I take it up again? —Will, Los AngelesDear Will, Depends…is that supposed to be JFK? If so, perhaps leave the brush alone. But seriously Will, you should pick up that...
The cliché of the naughty schoolgirl is so ingrained in Western culture that it’s hard to imagine a time before they existed. You can read Japanese Anime about them while wearing a professionally manufactured naughty schoolgirl costume. You can mix a Naughty...
Like many practicing artists, Martin Durazo is also an educator, having taught at colleges like Otis and Pomona. But he’s made an indelible mark as a public school teacher, having taught at Inner-City Arts Los Angeles, the Montebello Unified School District. Since...
The first encounter with the most strikingly original art (not unlike the most speculative scientific thinking) is always a bit strange – possibly configured, oriented or abstracted in a way toward which our minds and senses can only gradually accustom themselves. We...
I’ve been trying to discourage art, cultural, political, fashion and retail organizations of every size from exhibiting, performing, organizing, opening, demonstrating or launching anything during the summer before Labor Day, and especially August. But I suppose it’s...
I’d taken a photographer friend to The Getty to look at the Light, Paper, Process show curated by Virginia Heckert – a must for any photographer and, for that matter, for anyone interested in process-oriented form and media (which includes myself, in recent months)....
Jeffrey Vallance’s séance/performance, Ghost Writers – a collaboration with the self-titled psychic astrologer, Joseph Ross, held in conjunction with Vallance’s show at CB1 Gallery, The Medium Is the Message – was ostensibly intended to draw out the spirits (and...
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