Monica may be one of the sparest scripts I have ever seen put to film. The story itself is scarcely more than a classic trope whittled down to its most slender thread—the nostalgia/anti-nostalgia tale filtered through a very specific lens of estrangement. It’s a...
The Hermès Birkin handbag is the stuff of legend. Named for actress Jane Birkin, each bag is hand-tooled in the finest leather or crocodile. The bags are highly sought out by the nouveau riche. Customers for new releases are placed on a waiting list and there is a...
Dear Babs, Your last letter really pissed me off. You spent so much time talking about how great AI art is that you glossed over the more serious issues of copyright and intellectual property. What gives? —Pissed in Pasadena Dear Pissed, I only got so many words for...
She does! She really does! An integral part of the community, Rose Matters more than you might imagine. After all, where would we be without rose-colored glasses, rose hips tea, rose water or some child’s irresistible rosy cheeks in Buffalo New York in the dead of...
Meriwether Blue decided to become a nun and start her own order separate from the Archdiocese, but more aligned with the high-flying nuns of Costa Rica—those avid, though seldom seen, forest dwellers for whom the soul can only be awakened in accordance with the sky....
Great Britain is in serious decline. The City has lost its position as Europe’s indispensable financial center, the UK economy is in recession and its vaunted National Health Service is in shambles. The Tories have ruled Britannia for 12 straight years, much of it in...
Dear Babs, I have been following a lot of the conversations about AI-generated art and I’m concerned that it’s going to be bad for artists. I’m worried it’s going to steal from existing artwork the algorithm vacuums up and make it so people don’t value the skill it...
Arrival: Santa Monica Airport, FRIEZE LA Is there such a thing as too much art? My eyeballs think so, as they began to glaze over Saturday afternoon while browsing the art fare at the Felix art fair at the Roosevelt Hotel. It was Day Four of my marathon. In February...
Savage Saffron is so much more than a condiment to spice up the rice. He is fearless and courageous, bold and unwavering in his resolve, but more importantly, he is truly authentic, a one-of-a-kind maverick whose influence on modern popular culture is quite...
Let me start by just getting a few things off my 28AA chest. I didn’t make it to ANY of the satellite Frieze Projects and am particularly upset about missing at least two of them—specifically Kelly Akashi’s project, Heirloom at the Villa Aurora (last week’s Pick of...
‘People are talking about….’ is the way Vogue used to frame it from the old Diana Vreeland/Leo Lerman days until well into this century. And people have been talking about Yuja Wang’s Rachmaninoff cycle since her marathon performance at Carnegie Hall less than two...
Denouement Daffodil is a real downer and the first person to leave the party, proffering reasons like “I must go home and feed my guppies,” or “I can’t concentrate because my nose hairs are making me sneeze.” Always quick to wrap things up and never one for a winded...
Dear Friends, It is with deep sorrow that we inform you that we lost Jim early on Monday morning, after a long illness. Jim’s last days were spent at peace with his family, and true to his character, he kept working until the very end, finishing a lengthy review of a...
"The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / The ceremony of innocence is drowned...." W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming Since its inception, Pussy Riot (Nadya Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina, Yekaterina Samutsevich, et al.) made the balaclava a trademark, but I...
Okay…so…we get notes. We get feedback. We hear the gossip, the suggestions of angry whispering from one corner or another. First of all– there’s more, there always is; and I’m happy to acknowledge and eager to share it all—or at least as much as I can get down...
A bomb explodes in one of the Met’s galleries leaving 13-year-old Theo motherless in the harrowing opening of Donna Tartt’s 2013 bestselling novel, The Goldfinch. In the wake of the explosion, caused by an apparent terrorist attack, a mysterious survivor prompts Theo...
I have a friend who, for the most part, paints abstract paintings. We were talking on the couch the other week about this period where she had started making not-abstract paintings. She had painted paintings with images of recognizable things, with words, with clear...
Alt Coins, Bear Market, Crypto Winter, Down Bad, Expected Returns, FTX Fraud, Government Oversight, Hacked ($477M), Insolvent, JPEGs, KYC, Liquidity Gone, Margin Trading; I could easily go through the whole alphabet alluding to the current crypto market conditions,...
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