NFTs are here, ushering in a new Golden Age in art. The flood of fiscal support into the NFT market has changed everything. This world has become very real and very serious, extremely fast. Investment firms are buying Degenerate Apes to flip! There’s a need to...
NFTs Flood LA
Warhol Case Goes to the Supreme Court Art Brief
Andy Warhol is having another “Moment.” He continues to remain a huge part of the social and artistic zeitgeist decades after his death. His Warhol Diaries are currently dramatized in a multi-part documentary on Netflix (narrated by a spooky robotic-voice AI “Andy”)...
The Art of Cruelty — 10 Years Later Decoder
A lot has changed since 2011, when Maggie Nelson first published The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning, her critically acclaimed collection of essays addressing violence and transgression in avant-garde art. One thing that’s changed is the word “trigger”—now much more...
A Look into Warhol’s Love Life Off the Wall
The Andy Warhol Diaries, 2022 Netflix Limited Series “If you want to know all about Andy Warhol, just look at the surface of my paintings and films and me, and there I am. There’s nothing behind it.” —Andy Warhol In his 1987 LA Times obituary of Andy Warhol, William...
Hungarian Rhapsodies Bunker Vision
Early success in any of the arts comes with a certain peril. This is especially true for artists whose art is rebelling against something like an authoritarian government. Filmmakers tend to require a lot of resources, so they are especially prone to censorship by...
SIGHTS UNSCENE Fashion at Frieze Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, 2022
SHOPTALK: LA Art News LA Gallery Migration, Museum Make-overs, and more.
New York, New York! The art market is back, and here in SoCal we’re seeing it with a slew of New York galleries moving in. Pace’s “mergence” with Kayne Griffin is official, and I hear the new signage now bears the Pace name. Sean Kelly gallery is occupying a...
ASK BABS Nonna's No-No
Dear Babs, I recently acquired an old painting of mine from grad school. It looks fabulous in the kitchen. It’s from a series of feminist art, large paintings of nude women in pin-up “cheesecake” positions taken from ’60s playing cards. I now have two grandchildren...
Fran Lebowitz Will Judge You Now Fran Lebowitz at The Broad Stage, April 30, 2022
What is it about a curmudgeon? ...asked a curmudgeon. Or so have I occasionally been obliquely described. ‘Curmudgeonly’, rather than an actual ‘curmudgeon’. So far.... I thought about this inexact and usually quite inaccurate categorization intermittently last...
Remarks on Color: Ukrainian Blue and Gold May's Hue
Collectively, we are so much more than colors. We are the beating, impregnable heart of our country – now brought to our knees in the fetid air, on the bloodied streets, yet if you look up, we are the cerulean sky and the golden amulet of the sun. Now we flee in dirty...
In Our Daughter’s Eyes — opera by Du Yun, created with Nathan Gunn Self-definition and reconstruction as post-catastrophic workaround
It may be just me (and the mess that is my life), but my thinking lately is that we’re at a state of human cultural development where most of the noteworthy cultural events—music, theatre, film, fine arts and performing arts generally—are like surprise symphonies. ...
Letters in Exile, No. 5 By Maria Agureeva
Artists are experiencing a sense of gratitude for the unexpected support and basic kindness shown to them. In the midst of exile and displacement, often the best of humanity reasserts itself. As Maria says in her fifth blog, “So many of my friends and colleagues who...
Letters in Exile, No. 4 By Maria Agureeva
As Maria was working on Blog 4, I happened upon an article about photographer Edward Burtynksy, who is of Ukrainian descent and still has family there. He was scheduled to photograph in Ukraine this year for other reasons than the war. His work has been postponed. He...
Remarks on Color: Raven’s Tail Black April's Hue
As famous architect Mies van der Rohe once said, “God is in the details!” So, when Raven’s Tail Black overheard a conversation between two unassuming strangers, describing her alternately as “Coal Black,” “Carbon Black,” “Midnight Black,” and by far the most...
Letters in Exile, No. 3 By Maria Agureeva
In her third blog, Maria considers the testimony of four artists from Ukraine and Russia. Each speaks powerfully about how the war is impacting them. We like to say artists speak truth to power. Courageous artists do this, yet often with severe consequences. Some of...
Yuja Wang — April 6, 2022, Disney Hall Aerial feats and blues for Ukraine
For those of us who have followed Yuja Wang’s career for the last 15 years or so (at least since her major American orchestral debuts) and especially over the last five, we have more or less come to expect two things: to be dazzled and to be surprised. Los Angeles...
Letters in Exile, No. 2 By Maria Agureeva
The soul of the arts in Russia is withering. In Ukraine it is being obliterated, literally. In this second blog, Maria is speaking to the loss of personal freedoms occurring in Russia that is deeply disturbing, and another fall out of the war. In Ukraine, the loss of...
Letters in Exile By Maria Agureeva
Since her residency at the 18th Street Arts Center four years ago, artist Maria Agureeva has been based in Los Angeles. Born in Ukraine and attending art school in Moscow, she travels periodically to Moscow, where a gallery supports her work and various collaborative...