Hello, Good-Bye: New Year for Hammer Museum Was 2022 a blur? It feels like it went by very quickly, too quickly, as we transitioned into the New Normal. People have returned to indoor dining, theaters are open and museums and art fairs are back—though some museums...
SHOPTALK: LA Art News
Monet with a Side of Mashed Potatoes Art Brief
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...
A Bold Statement Decoder
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...
Cold and Down The Digital
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,...
Afrofuture Zombies Bunker Vision
One of the very positive effects of MTV and YouTube is the restoration of demand for short films. Early cinema consisted mostly of short films. Auteurs of early cinema managed to pack a lot of plot into films that ran 20 minutes or less. MTV also inspired a lot of...
OFF THE WALL Under the Bridge
Thrift stores are potentially the end of the line for any object on sale therein; after that, it’s either ref-use or reuse. Consequently, there’s a poignancy to the purchase of any artwork from a thrift store, whether by an ironic hipster being or a sincere abuelita....
ASK BABS Jack of Not All Trades
Dear Babs, One of my greatest music heroes recently started painting. So when a local gallery showed his art in a pop-up show, I was excited to go. But his paintings are really not good. He’s had a very long career as a musician and always puts a ton of effort into...
ARTILLERY 2022 TOP TEN
There has never been a year in Los Angeles—certainly not in this century, more probably the last 30 years—when our artists haven’t delivered something surprising, extraordinary, something to change the way we talk and think about and look at the world. This year was...
Remarks on Color: Resolute Red January's Hue
It’s that time of year again, when the mistletoe has wilted and bedraggled Christmas trees line the city streets, slumped against dumpsters like drunken sailors. It’s that time of year when Resolute Red makes BIG plans, none of which will ever be realized, but it’s...
The L.A. Phil’s Tristan Project Long Day’s Journey Into Night by way of earth, water, fire, air, and the human element
We revisit the canonical operatic repertoire for many reasons. And—notions of gesamtkunstwerk to one side—it’s really no different with the Wagnerian repertoire. You could almost attach that description to operas dating from the Baroque. (One might easily make a...
Remarks on Color: Perspicacious Periwinkle December's Hue
Perspicacious Periwinkle is an avid reader of The Tarot, having once predicted the sudden death of the world’s oldest rhinoceros in Zambia, and a cataclysmic wind event that no one witnessed off the Cape of Good Hope. It is safe to say that PP as she calls herself on...
AI “Artist” Declares Victory Art Brief
The age of artificial intelligence (AI) has arrived whether we like it or not and now it has come to the art world. That should not really be much of a shock. It’s now five years since AlphaGo defeated the best Go players in the world. Writers have auto-complete...
ASK BABS Re-Entering the Art World
Dear Babs, What advice might you give to an older artist who would like to return to making art after a two-decade hiatus? I experienced a dead-end art career in my mid-40s, showing in copious group shows and occasional college gallery solo shows. I want to return to...
SHOPTALK: LA Art News OCMA Redefined, Museum Highlights and Art Fairs and Anniversaries
OCMA Redefined with its New Space What a roller coaster we’ve been on these last three years.Hard to believe how the world shut down in March 2020, and now California’s Governor Gavin Newsom announces that our State of Emergency will be over next Feb. 28. The museums...
Remarks on Color: Insouciant Indigo November's Hue
Insouciant Indigo doesn’t care. In other words, he simply does not give a rat’s ass about anything or anybody. A lifetime of ever darkening dreams has laid him low once and for all. To add insult to injury he’s never been popular with the ladies, being mostly...
Robert Berman has a world to sell to you. Santa Monica Auctions' ongoing reinvention
Robert Berman has always understood one essential factor driving the art market—and especially the auction market: the passion of collectors. To hear him tell it, you might think it was his own collector’s passion more than anything else that pushed him into the art...
Remarks on Color: Weird-Ass White October's Hue
Weird-Ass White has a secret death wish, a deep and unwavering desire to fall headlong into the arms of night with its ever-widening black mouth swallowing her alive, but being the good girl that she is, she never lets on. Instead, the world at large swallows her...
Remarks on Color: Mischievous Mustard September's Hue
Mischievous Mustard often shows up where he’s not wanted—on T-shirts and dress slacks, in the car (like the time Joe Morrison ate a hot dog for breakfast on his way to work and dropped it on his brand new leather seats), at the corners of Virginia Ramona’s mouth...