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...
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...
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