With all of the recent excitement about the NSA it seemed like a good time to feature the work of The Surveillance Camera Players. Since 1996 this group has been staging plays for security cameras. Their productions have included Waiting for Godot, 1984 and Ubu Roi....
Talk about art critics in public enough and they’ll respond—they are, as a people, very fond of electronic communication. And, unlike the other online-overrepresented—unlike xbox fans or strident antiboob activists—what they have to say is always fresh and new...
A racetrack is being demolished, and guess what, it’s not the Arcadian showpiece nestled beneath the San Gabriel mountains but the track of lakes, flowers and paranoia in the heart of Inglewood, City of Champions. In recent years this inner city workingman’s track has...
In retrospect, Machine Project—the Echo Park storefront operating for the last decade as a rapid-fire curatorial clearinghouse for founder/director Mark Allen’s tireless curiosity—would seem to have been one of the most influential artistic endeavors of the new...
Graffiti Since the Beginning of Time As ubiquitous as its namesake trees were the laminated warning signs recently posted around Joshua Tree: “Rattlesnake Canyon Temporarily Closed Due To Vandalism.” In January, a few markings appeared on the massive boulders that...
The Schorrs’ collection and career as collectors are bifurcated by their move to LA in 1989; before that, they were New York collectors, enjoying Soho parties and the tutelage of intellectual dealers such as Leo Castelli, plus the availability of great contemporary...
If sex has been around in art for so long, then why do O’Keeffe’s vulvalistic flowers generate so much special negative attention, as in the phrase, “Yeah, she’s good but I don’t like her—too obvious, too sexual.”? Is this because her sensually-charged paintings of...
London has an ancient history. Londinium was established on the current site of the City of London around 43 AD and served as a major commercial center for the Roman Empire. Since then it’s grown like layers of alluvial rock to create a complex palimpsest that from...
I spend a lot of time finding ways to make paintings that (I always hope miraculously) look like they aren’t paintings. And then I get what I wish for and they get mistaken in print for collages or computer things or photos of people by journalists who didn’t read the...
In a world where art is purchased to display as trophies, it can be hard to remember what a real art patron looks like. While researching my new favorite television station, I stumbled onto somebody who might qualify as the best art patron ever. The station is Classic...
The Los Angeles Free Music Society had its original heyday back in the 1970s, as much a dada and LSD-inspired piss-take on the high seriousness of experimental music—these were the days when Stockhausen was God—as a shaggy-dog extension of the Zappa/Beefheart/Wildman...
The Cooper Union’s School of Art is a very good place to go to college, and it’s free if you get in, but everyone who ever went has wondered at some point: Why does this place even have a school of art? There’s a School of Engineering which, okay, makes sense: Not...
For me, Claude Monet stands between two of my favorite artists who played with the disintegration of the object rather than its creation: J.M.W. Turner and Anselm Kiefer. Turner’s objects sailed forth only to be obliterated by light as if they were Viking funeral...
“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else,” wrote Italo Calvino in Invisible Cities. In an “Alternative Guide to...
In the late 1960s and into the ’70s an odd confluence of events made for some very curious cinema. Many stars that had become famous in the studio system were suddenly at loose ends to fend for themselves. At the same time, Hollywood was trying to get down with the...
I awoke at dawn, fuming. I had been having a drink with an actor friend the night before when he dropped the news on me that his buddy, "Josh," whose latest movie he had appeared in, wanted to “do something.” “He’s a great guy,” I was assured, “very funny.” The bar we...
I was, for six or seven seasons, baffled by The Cool Wall. It’s a wall full of pictures of cars on the British car show Top Gear. They take cars and go “Cool? Not cool? Subzero?” and then put the picture somewhere between left and right, between cool and uncool, with...
It doesn’t seem long ago that the sight of a young white face in this supermarket was a rare thing, but now the place is swarming with them. They look like the death of youth culture: mopey advertisements for their own redundancy, they sport an awkward array of...