Spring is on its way, and the perfect time for a little getaway to the desert before things get hot. And you know how very very hot the Coachella Valley can be. Most of us may already have visited Joshua Tree National Park and Palm Springs, but there’s also Indian...
More than a re-imagining of the Michael Jackson story, Julien Nitzberg’s play, For the Love of a Glove, serves as a point of departure for a wildly surreal take on an already bizarre life, from the troubled entertainer’s repressed childhood in Gary, Indiana, to the...
There is a myth, subscribed to by all ambitious but unsuccessful artists, that they will be discovered posthumously, and their work revered by future generations. That may be cold comfort, but when it comes to fame, the SoCal artist Robert Williams doubles down with...
“A new thing, a spring later, a different maker” are the words moving-image artist Nathaniel Dorsky uses to position Colophon (for the Arboretum Cycle), 2018, his newest work which investigates light and objecthood. The film, which premiered at the 2018 Toronto...
Who said being an artist was easy? Today Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is known as the top-selling woman artist in the world, but it’s hard to believe how many difficulties she had to overcome before she got to where she is now. Or perhaps, not so hard to...
The Renaissance Hotel chain has undertaken a wide-ranging renovation of its global brand, upgrading scores of properties around the world in a bid to carve out a new, more contemporary identity. Each of the new treatments seeks to exploit connections between the...
Soft Power is a very timely musical about the uses and misuses of power, a profoundly ambitious satire in which noted playwright David Henry Hwang tries to explain the dismal results of the 2016 elections. Hwang is no shrinking violet when it comes to tough...
In the dystopian future of Wes Anderson’s stop-motion animation Isle of Dogs, Megasaki City is gripped with the panic over the contagious dog flu. The nefarious Mayor Kobayashi (voiced by Kunichi Nomura) exiles all dogs to Trash Island, a place piled with the detritus...
Minnie Panis has a problem with existence. Minnie, budding Dutch conceptual artist and central character in Niña Weijers’ debut novel The Consequences, finds the idea of her own existence an excruciatingly difficult one. In this, however, she is not alone. The notion...
2017 has been a brilliant year for the movies. And they were good in so many ways, let me try to count them: They offered novel subject matter, woman falls in love with fish-man in The Shape of Water; a despised ex-athlete gets her cinema redemption in I, Tonya; a...
If you’re all Nutcrackered out even before Christmas arrives, Sugar Plum Fairy may be the perfect tonic. Sandra Tsing Loh, as actor, writer and comedienne, mines her pre-teen years growing up in the San Fernando Valley. She relates the story of being the younger,...
In the new Swedish film The Square directed by Ruben Ostlund, Christian (Claes Bang ) is the hip and handsome chief curator of X-Royal, a major contemporary art museum so-named because it is set in a former royal palace. After being pickpocketed on the street, he does...
Alys Beach is a 158-acre community along the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, on Florida’s panhandle coast. Each of the 107 chalk-white homes and condos evoke Bermuda, Antigua, Guatemala. Residents can choose from a book of approved architects. The streets are silent....
Half the population of Los Angeles is now Latino, but its signature industry, the film business, fails to include a significant number of Latinos in feature films or deal with stories that may be especially relevant to their lives. This fall the Academy of Motion...
There’s a picture that photographer Virginia Liberatore took of painter Jean-Michel Basquiat and Madonna in 1983. The two stars, who were dating at the time, had arrived at a party in full regalia—fedoras, big watches, leather jackets. In the image, Madonna resembles...
Artists and curators Ron Athey and James Spooner know that Los Angeles has become the art world omphalos and so decided to convert last Saturday’s Broad Happening into a 21st century Oracle of Delphi. Hosted in alignment with the Broad’s current multimedia show...
Have you ever been at a party, laughing convulsively while draining your second glass of prosecco, and then suddenly, with a cold, horrified shiver, thought—wait, oh no, someday I’m going to be dead? That’s what the work of Takashi Murakami is like. Murakami, the...
The recognized History of Art is marked by a movement, our blue-chip Art Stars and our institutions. Often more interesting and dynamic, the smaller histories of a regional art community are established by the galleries, art spaces and the people who support them. The...
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