Times change. In 1963, Hannah Arendt famously wrote about Adolf Eichmann and the “banality of evil”; in 2018 we get artist Rachel Feinstein exploring the evil of banality. It’s not just that the pieces at Secrets, her latest show at Gagosian, are banal, they’re...
In much of his work, Paul McCarthy explores juvenilia to an uncomfortably advanced degree, finding profane inspiration in all things coprocentric and aesthetically offensive. But McCarthy’s current exhibition at the Hauser & Wirth Los Angeles gallery appears to...
Film director John Waters is best known for his trilogy of ’60s and ’70s transgressive cult cinema classics Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Desperate Living. These films used a repeating troupe of actors, the most famous being the stars Divine, Mink Stole, and...
Lowbrow began in the early 1980s as an art movement that embraced the attitudes and iconography of distinctly American subcultures, embracing demolition derbies and surfing instead of “highbrow” French Impressionist painting or Italian operas. Although there were...
Palm Springs may be the furthest eastern reach of Los Angeles’ urban/suburban schizophrenia and whiny babblespeak, but the Palm Springs Tourism Board has done its best to overcome such a provincial status by adopting the slogan, “Like No Place Else.” That can be said...
If an artist’s style is a visual representation of their technical abilities, then the painter Deborah Salt should have no problem applying her Minimalist talents to house painting. I mean that sincerely and without sarcasm or irony, for after all, paint itself has no...
Art galleries can be places where the mundane becomes divine, but as the front door of the Honor Fraser Gallery closed behind me, I knew that what I saw was what I was gonna get. In front of me was what appeared to be a selection of various types and lengths of...
There’s a new smell in town, and the best way to find the source is by following your nose down Grand Avenue to MOCA. Yeah, I thought it was coming from the room of stale, day-old Rothkos too, but it doesn’t take long to figure out that the odor comes from the R.M....
Marilyn Monroe died over 54 years ago, but the culture vultures are still circling her crypt, eyeing the last unturned scraps of her life and career for commercial pickings. But, as the bits of relevant material lessen to nothingness, what is left really, to take from...
In the four-page press release for his show at Blum & Poe, the artist Mark Grotjahn lets us in on the little secret he “knew” as a young man: “Art could be whatever (he) wanted it to be.” That tenet would prove to save his ass when he decided to abandon the human...
The event invitation to the art performance piqued my interest; after all, who wouldn’t want to see an artist and a porn-star dominatrix in a motel room “presidential debate” smackdown? Plus, there was the added attraction of an older, established “grande daminatrix”...
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