Part journey of self-discovery, part family history, part window into an artist’s oeuvre, Sally Mann’s memoir Hold Still is simply wonderful, sharing that same combination of hauntingly beautiful lyricism and truth that are the hallmarks of her photographs.For most...
With trunk tucked up compactly—the elephant’s signof defeat—he resisted, but is the child of reason now. His straight trunk seems to say: when what we hoped for came to nothing, we revived.—From “Elephants,” Marianne Moore Dick Blau uses his camera to map...
According to his Wikipedia entry, this is Michael Peppiatt’s eighth book about Francis Bacon. If all of his Bacon books were packaged like a deluxe DVD, this would be the really good feature length documentary about the “making of.” He certainly deserves to tell his...
<p><em></em><em></em>As lookers and lovers of contemporary art, we too often encounter millennial artists making work as willing (or proud, even) participants in a culture of banality. That is, the isolation and presentation of...
Given the current narrative of Los Angeles art (dueling contemporary museums on Grand Street, hangar-sized prestige galleries in East LA, art openings timed to coincide with Oscars) it is surprising to remember that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is only 50...
So, somehow I wound up teaching a couple of Modern Art History classes, right? I’m not exactly thrilled with the default textbooks, so I’m keeping my eyes open for a replacement. So when Thames & Hudson recently issued the revised second edition of Art Since 1900...
“I trust in the intelligence of the audience,” says artist and filmmaker David Shapiro, whose elliptical, complex documentary film, Missing People, had its debut screening at Toronto's Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in April and will have its...
Bernice is premiering at the Palm Springs Shortfest next week and the eponymous documentary celebrates the spunky tenured New York art dealer, Bernice Steinbaum as a long-time pioneer of female and minority artists. I’m sitting beside Steinbaum now, taking in her “New...
You wouldn’t know it from such thriving, vibrant publications as Artillery (can I get that raise now boss?) but print is a dying medium. Sure, they still run off enough copies of Divergent and Heaven is for Real to build a paper mache penitentiary the size of an...
“And so it was I ate my pet [a rabbit] and remembered all of the fun times of summer. [. . .] That was the season when I realized that I must leave my loves behind.”Coming of age on the Norman coast and in the streets of Paris in the shadow of 1968: this delirious...
for Winfield Mowder and Gary MatsonThe third voice gave it away,the “just calm down” and make it believable voice,captured on the outgoing message.An unnecessary four-hour drive to San Francisco to see a doctor; death was already in the room.Winfield and Gary lived...
Nestled in an upscale residential community in Montecito, Lotusland is a 37-acre nonprofit botanical nirvana filled with over 950 species of exotic plants arranged in nearly 20 gardens. It’s also the historic estate of the late Polish opera singer and socialite Madame...
Art Basel Miami was such a social swirl (what did that Miley Cyrus concert at the Raleigh Hotel have to do with art?), that it’s hard to remember the actual works of art that were on display. Collectors jostled to be seen at the first Art Basel viewing at 11 a.m. You...
There were moments in the recent James Darrah directed production of the Los Angeles Philharmonic performance of the Beethoven Missa Solemnis, conducted by Michael Tilson-Thomas (a co-production with the San Francisco Symphony, in celebration of Tilson-Thomas’ 70th...
It’s an amazing true story—the real story behind the phenomenally successful paintings of those children with those big, sad eyes of the ’50s and ’60s, the ones that defined “kitsch.” We always thought it was this fellow named Walter Keane who painted them, but it...
In the early ’70s, during the couple of years before punk broke, one of the most exciting subcultural zeitgeists centered around a trio of novels—ostensibly sci-fi—written by former Playboy associate editors Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, detailing the secret...
The secret to a successful trip to Art Basel Miami is not the fair itself, but getting in on the hoopla created by the other events that surround it. Artillery did just that when invited to join an exclusive BMW art caravan—the purpose of which was not divulged to us...
Art Basel is a world unto itself; as the 13th year of the art fair rolled through Miami in early December to strong sales, completing a re-bound from the 2008 market drop, its massive influx of cash, glamour, international speculators and celebrity have triumphantly...
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