Awol – as you gentle readers may not have noticed – was a little more awol than usual the last week or so. Once upon a time that might have implied too many bars or after-hours clubs. Or piles of actual paid work (remember salaried employment?—once almost as...
It’s no secret to readers of this blog that awol’s location coordinates can occasionally be tracked to an opera house, whether in this city (the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, or more recently, across the street at Disney Hall), Long Beach, or further afield (which...
One rainy afternoon, Edward Goldman’s parents popped into the winter palace of the Russian Czars, known today as the state Hermitage Museum of Russia, with their young son. The next time it rained, Edward asked to go again to the “place where naked men and women are...
In a recent documentary called $ellebrity, we are treated to the spectacle celebrities face every time they try to leave their abodes. If a good shot of a celebrity can fetch a high price, there might be 50 photographers yelling insults to get a dirty look. Such an...
Art fame is a weird fame: I know artists whose work has been seen by millions who can’t pay the rent. I know artists with unrecognizable names who could pay rent for a year with half a piece.Unlike the film or music industry, fine art isn’t based on selling lots of...
Our eyes are drawn to remnants and remains in recent years – the ancient, outmoded, rejected, the discarded; remnants of the industrial 19th century, the post-industrial 20th, even the proto-digital cyber age that preceded the present within the millennial memory...
One thing that came across in Jeff Koons’ recent Broad-sponsored (“Un-Private”) conversation with John Waters was a sense of the satisfaction Koons took from his work as a bond salesman and commodities trader on Wall Street. His fascination with commercial exchange...
As regular visitors to awol are familiar with by now, I tend to veer off the track a bit, linger a bit too long over this curiosity or that novelty (hopefully without pushing you all into a full-blown meditation – I assume you have your own facilitators for that), or...
Jim Jarmusch’s recent release, Only Lovers Left Alive, is not a successful film in the conventional sense; yet I wonder now whether I should cherish it all the more for that very reason. I think my chief complaint about it is that it’s not a successful script – which...
Mozart, like other great artists before and since, offers us a topological mirror in which to test and tease our perspectives on the universe and our fragile foothold in it. The evocative power of his greatest work is a sublime irony, felt all the more acutely as the...
Could there be such a thing as an orchestra of memory? A kind of color-organ (remember those?—no, of course you don’t; you’re too young) soundtrack of apprehension, clairvoyance, and the insight and deep vision of compressed years? (And how, after all, do we...
The big news yesterday was The Getty’s roll-out of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA. (And you thought they were going to just let go of that franchise – after (let’s face it) lackluster performance and architecture modules? Not a chance.) ‘LA/LA’ stands for L.A.’s...
Martin Creed’s new exhibition—he of the 2001-Turner-prize-winning-light-bulb-turning-on-and-off-fame—is witty, playful, occasionally insightful and often very irritating. The exhibition spans the entire Hayward gallery and ranges from a spot of barely noticeable...
I don’t remember when I first ran across Ad Reinhardt’s dazzling, sarcastic collage comics—probably in the ’80s (around the same time I stumbled upon his brilliant “Art is Art. Everything else is everything else” screeds, but before I saw his equally but oppositely...
The influence of money on art, you may have heard, is pernicious—or toxic, or corrupting or it is another word that means “bad.” Especially these days. You may have heard that.And why not? It’s bad on everything else. It’s even bad on people who have it—stockbrokers...
The photographs at the Annenberg Space for Photography of National Geographic magazine are cinema-size, faces larger than life, their suffering and innocence unbearable but attached to your memory forever. There are also animals filled with destroyed beauty and a...
It is often the case that an artist who creates a lifetime of strong work will be known for a single piece. One of the shorthand images that denote surrealism is a fur teacup. More people know this image than the name of the artist who made it (Meret Oppenheim). In...
What makes a fair work? (Of any kind, really: a question out of Merchant Capitalism 101—or even Trade 101.) The merchants and the goods are key—by far the most important factor. But we’re not just talking about a marketplace, retail street or mall design – an...