Dear Reader, It is inexcusable to not be well read, mainly because it’s so easy to fix. Just read more! But who has time? Only recently, when a friend asked what book I was reading, I had to admit that all I’d been reading was art copy. He found that unacceptable and...
The New Normal We thought the world would end in fire, or possibly in ice. And now we know it can end with a virus. As a child growing up in Taiwan and then later in the US during the Cold War, I often imagined—and literally dreamed—how the world would end....
Salvador Dali has always had a troubled relationship with the Art World. His work embraced figurative representation during a century where deconstruction and reinvention were the mode du jour. His theatrics often upstaged his considerable talent. The amount of energy...
Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, 2020 By Okwui Enwezor 264 pages Phaidon/New Museum, New York In a pivotal scene in Francis Ford Coppola’s film The Godfather a Mafia don grieves over the body of his dead son. “Look how they massacred my boy,”...
No one ever “works” in Eric Rohmer’s movies—but they do read. By necessity, Rohmer’s setting is one of leisure, whether it’s the beaches of Biarritz or the shores of the French Riviera. His characters need ample time to read and to daydream, and for ennui, disturbed...
Tinnitus hissed through the music, the laughter, the static. It wasn’t crowded in there, but it was loud. Two women at the bar, a few feet away, were engaged in a conversation that consisted of whooping and screeching at the top of their lungs in response to every...
Rooting through used bookstores in Berlin in 2006, I discovered the minibuchs published in East Germany during the ’70s and ’80s. These tiny volumes, with their exquisite bindings and photos of happy children giving floral bouquets to returning cosmonauts, launched me...
The Bookseller of Florence: The Story of the Manuscripts That Illuminated the Renaissance By Ross King 496 pages Atlantic Monthly Press “All evil is born from ignorance. Yet writers have illuminated the world, chasing away the darkness.” —Vespasiano da Bisticci...
Art Is Everything By Yxta Maya Murray 229 pages TriQuarterly Yxta Maya Murray—art writer, law professor, fiction author—draws upon the disparate threads of her writing practice to construct her new novel, Art Is Everything, a kind of Bildungsroman of the Los Angeles...
Lover’s Eyes: Eye Miniatures from the Skier Collection, 2021 Ed. Elle Shushan; essays by Graham C. Boettcher, Stephen Lloyd, and Elle Shushan. Photography by Nik Layman. 280 pages Giles Ltd. Lover’s Eyes, a new catalog on eye miniatures, lets us peer at one of the...
I met Mark Chamberlain in March 2003, a few days after the onset of the Iraq War. I visited a gallery in Laguna Beach to write a review of his recent work chronicling the potential horrors of that war. Mark had been mounting politically charged installations for...
NoLab By Richard Roth 232 pages Owl Canyon Press Being a voracious reader of contemporary fiction with a particular interest in mystery novels, thrillers and mysteries about artists and art thefts, I was excited to happen upon Richard Roth’s novel NoLab (2019) earlier...
Sidewalk Champions By Suitcase Joe Burn Barrel Press In the wake of the unprecedented court decree issued in April by a federal judge ordering the city of Los Angeles to provide shelter for the 4,600 souls currently living in downtown skid row by this October, the...
Master Architects of Southern California 1920–1940 by Marc Appleton, Stephen Gee and Bret Parsons 208 pages Angel City Press Regarding Paul R. Williams: A Photographer’s View by Janna Ireland 224 pages Angel City Press When Paul Revere Williams...
Post York Story and Art by James Romberger with additional material by Crosby Romberger 112 pages Dark Horse Comics/Berger Books “They somehow set fire to what was left of the East Side.” —POST YORK, p.86. The city had been ceded to climate change. It was...
After living through the angst-laden whirlwind that was 2020, I can’t imagine a better show to see than “Alice Neel: People Come First” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Neel’s dual focus on ordinary, often invisible people and social justice issues resonates...
Billionaire Eli Broad, who passed away in April at 87, was a giant of philanthropy not just in the art world but also in education, medicine and science. He was among the top handful of cultural benefactors in Los Angeles...
Kacie is The Public. More specifically, she said it would be fair to describe her as “A woman who doesn’t closely follow the contemporary art scene but might go to a show this summer”. ARTILLERY: Are you excited about going to see art now that the lockdown has ended?...