Revolution in the Making “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity ...” Charles Dickens was writing about London and Paris before and...
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...
Dear Readers Happy New Year! Last October I was invited to moderate a panel titled: “Is Art our Last Safe Place?” The general topic was whether art could be healing in times of war, poverty, starvation, overpopulation ...you know, all that stuff that just keeps...
HELP SAVE SANTA FE ART COLONYThe Santa Fe Art Colony Tenants—some 80 working artists —recently had a close call. Theirs is the only rent-restricted artists’ live/work community in Los Angeles, and the clock was ticking down on their 30-year agreement with the...
Dear Readers It’s our Miami issue, meaning this issue goes to Miami. It really doesn’t have anything to do with Miami or the fairs. But it is an issue we designed, content-wise, by what we thought Miami fairgoers might like to read. This year we made it our Interview...
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...
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...
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...
Dear Readers It’s our birthday! We’re 10 years old this September. I’ve been writing this letter for 10 years—it’s almost unbelievable to me. A decade is always something to pay attention to, I think. A relationship of any kind seems like an accomplishment after 10...
ART BASEL IS BIGThe Big Mama of Art FairsArt Basel is big, very big. The main event is on two levels of a circularly designed building at the Messe Basel complex, with the “Unlimited” section next door in a gigantic convention hall. A series of outdoor installations,...
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...
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...
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...
Subscribe to our weekly Gallery Rounds Newsletter for new Reviews, Art opps, Art Events, & More every week!
