Media
CURRENT EVENTS: documenta 14

CURRENT EVENTS: documenta 14

Every five years the sedate city of Kassel, Germany, launches an art expo that attempts to capture the zeitgeist of our times, documenta. This 14th edition was an ambitious one, costing over $36 million, with one part opening in Athens, Greece, in April (ending July...

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FILM: Manifesto

FILM: Manifesto

The film Manifesto speaks in the voice of the 20th century, when manifestos meant something—a time when the latest artist or art movement stormed the Bastille of conformity, declaring the one true doctrine—theirs, naturally—and the rest of us sat up and paid...

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Mar’s Warped Drives

Mar’s Warped Drives

Mar is sitting in his Marina Del Rey studio, wearing a pair of ripped, paint-splattered jeans. Behind him is the largest piece featured in his upcoming solo exhibition at Art Angels: a 6x6-foot color-wheel whirlpool. Mar points directly across from him to a painting...

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The Monster Builder

The Monster Builder

From the moment the stage lights go up for The Monster Builder, the audience is caught in a whirlwind of over-the-top sophisticated banter, much of it addressing architecture. The first scene reveals an ultra modern glass house with inhabitants, Gregor, the...

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Honolulu Biennial

Honolulu Biennial

The art world as we know it is in a constant state of reinvention and definition, continually seeking relevance. In this quarter of the great game, the self-intentioned academics are running with the ball. Global societal, biological and environmental issues are king...

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Turner Prize 2017 shortlist announced

Turner Prize 2017 shortlist announced

Tate Britain today announced the four artists who have been shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2017. The artists are (in alphabetical order): Hurvin Anderson, Andrea Büttner, Lubaina Himid and Rosalind Nashashibi. This year an exhibition of work by the four shortlisted...

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Fabulous Tales

Fabulous Tales

Injecting one or more inane Star Wars puns into a discussion of George Lucas’ proposed museum would be de rigueur; but I’ll abstain. It is time to take Lucas’ idea seriously. Suspend the adulation. Cut the skepticism of commercial pictures’ merit. A 275,000...

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BOOKS

BOOKS

Yves Klein is having a moment. If one goes to the news section of the Yves Klein Archives, one will notice that there has recently been a discernible uptick in the number of recent exhibitions of his work. Given that he died in 1962—at an unexpectedly young age—this...

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733 LA Women in the Here and Now

733 LA Women in the Here and Now

When Kim Schoenstadt first asked me if I would photograph “Now Be Here LA 2016”—the historic group photograph of hundreds of LA-based women artists that she was organizing at Hauser, Wirth, & Schimmel—I simultaneously felt flattered and out of my depth. I’m an...

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FILM: Sky Ladder

FILM: Sky Ladder

It is now official: awe is an essential human emotion. Yes, awe—a sense of wonder at something that is greater or beyond any single individual. “Early in human history, awe was reserved for feelings toward divine beings,” writes Dacher Keltner, professor of psychology...

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National Telecast Spotlights LA Artists

National Telecast Spotlights LA Artists

This coming Friday, September 23, at 9 P.M. ET, PBS will air an hour-long Los Angeles-themed episode, the third installment of a four-episode block called Season 8 of its series Art in the Twenty-First Century.The series specializes in charismatic, broad-brush but...

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Can The Broad Rise Above

Can The Broad Rise Above

Victorian critic Walter Pater’s famous maxim that “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” admires the musician for her destruction of boundaries:  “[Music’s] end is not distinct from the means, the form from the matter, the subject from the...

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No Beauty in Hell at The Broad

No Beauty in Hell at The Broad

In his Aesthetic Theory, philosopher Theodor W. Adorno wrote of art’s “double character,” that is, the idea that art flourishes when it resists society, and dies if it is swallowed by the capitalist hive-mind. “Art is the social antithesis to society, not directly...

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Summer Happening at The Broad

Summer Happening at The Broad

In 1963, artist Allan Kaprow held a “Tree Happening” at George Segal’s New Jersey farm. Kaprow’s written instructions commanded a crowd holding tree saplings to venture into a field, which had been outfitted with poles bedazzled by tar-paper strips. A leader of these...

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FILM: Troublemakers

FILM: Troublemakers

Land Art, also known as Earth Art, emerged in the period that was, with hindsight, clearly one of the most radical, innovative, experimental  and groundbreaking periods in the history of art. The genre is part of a much wider trend that falls under the umbrella of...

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AN APPRECIATION

AN APPRECIATION

The black star, of semi-classical gravity theory, is an alternative to the black hole of general relativity. The black star’s infalling matter is converted to dark or vacuum energy—there is no singularity, no information-destroying void, as in the black hole. The...

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Red

Red

The South Coast Repertory Theater’s production of Red, John Logan’s Tony Award winning play about abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko, which opened in Costa Mesa on January 22, is directed by SCR’s Founding Artistic Director David Emmes and stars Angeleno Mark...

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David Bowie: Ashes to Ashes

David Bowie: Ashes to Ashes

David Bowie released his envoi-like album, Blackstar, on his birthday, and so a lightness of being seems to shine through his final week on earth. His lightness might be his general M.O., considering he made pop music out of lyrics about “sailors fighting in a dance...

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