Dear Readers Happy New Year! We start off 2015 with a survey of Asian art. I’ve been wanting to cover contemporary Asian art for quite some time but never had the confidence that we could represent that culture. It’s the largest and most populated continent on the...
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...
Los Angeles was treated to some remarkable public conversations this fall. In early October The Broad conversations series presented a fascinating dialogue between artist Kara Walker and filmmaker Ava DuVernay. A few weeks later the Hammer Museum offered up a...
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...
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art continues to set a high bar for film exhibitions with their latest, “Haunted Screens: German Cinema in the 1920s.” The striking exhibition design by architects Amy Murphy and Michael Maltzan has it “interrupted” by three...
Gallery MovesIt’s a Californian Kinda ThingBy Scarlet Cheng It’s hard to keep up with the rash of new and relocated galleries this year—is this because of the economic rebound, or because Los Angeles continues to become more important in American’s cultural...
Dear Readers,Lately I’ve been getting wistful for the past. It’s not that I want to go back, never to return. It’s more that I yearn for more simple and innocent times; I’m not sure I prefer wisdom to naiveté.It’s the direction art has been going that has made me...
If you asked beginning art students to name a living artist in 1998, the most frequent reply would be Thomas Kinkade. Given the art world’s fascination with popularity and money, this is hardly surprising. By this point in his career many upscale malls had galleries...
BOON OR BUSTPost Rail Plan on Wrong Track at Bergamot “They’re basically destroying Bergamot Station,” says Wayne Blank, who holds the master lease on the galleries and art institutions at the Bergamot Station arts complex. (He’s also the “Wayne” of Shoshana Wayne...
Dear Readers,When I started writing as opposed to making art, there was a lot of disapproval from my friends and colleagues. I was thrilled with my new creative outlet and found it to be more gratifying than painting. One comment from an editor was a little puzzling....
And the vampire pendulum swings back to another extreme: vile, wretched, diseased and genocidal. The FX channel is due to air The Strain this July based on a trilogy written by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan: The Strain (2009), The Fall (2010), and Night Eternal...
Dear Readers, The biggest art news in Los Angeles today is the arrival of MOCA’s new director, Philippe Vergne, whom staff writer Ezrha Jean Black interviews for this issue. Although Artillery instantly voiced skepticism when his predecessor came on board a few years...
A search of William Burroughs on Amazon turns up 3,976 items. If you add the word biography to your search, it narrows down to 135 items. Barry Miles wrote a biography of him in 1993, and released a revised version in 2002. He has also written books about Allen...
We all wonder about the secret life of quiet people—surely, there’s turbulence churning beneath placid surfaces. In the fascinating new documentary Finding Vivian Maier, we follow John Maloof, a self-styled photo historian and first-time filmmaker, on his journey to...
Dear Readers,Troublemaker Dave Hickey blew into town last month. The outspoken art critic held forth at the Grand Central Market, gracing Angelenos with his caustic observations about the corroding art world. There was much tweetin’ and hollerin’ after (and apparently...
There is a popular stereotype of the 20th-century artist as a hard-living bon vivant who lives to paint and leaves a trail of broken hearts. Most current versions this type have a brand to maintain. The last thing you can imagine such a person wanting is privacy....
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