Along with everyone else, I was always thrilled to see another painting of Wayne Thiebaud’s cars screeching up and down the insane hills of San Francisco in one traffic jam after another, melting into another modern painting of man’s insanity. However, when I finally...

Andy Warhol was not a weak, whiney, limp-wristed gay man. Quite the opposite, in fact: he had different personalities for different people. To his nieces and nephews, he was your normal uncle Andy; they loved him and wrote a storybook about how they would wake up...

Diego Rivera’s murals are a tale—no, a single impression—of the epic journey of a country. It is chopped up into events, into battles, and years of endless marching and daily struggles. But the viewer still looks at a mural in a single moment and feels overpowered by...

Yes sir, every Saturday, the Post magazine would come to our door and I would squeal silently with delight because on the cover was yet another Norman Rockwell painting and I got what the painting was saying. It was funny, but not like a Dick Tracy cartoon: It was...

We talk about this art and that art, and then we either start seeing influences or start making them up. A popular one is the Asian influence on the Impressionists, who we like to consider our greatest artists but we really mean most popular. However, comparing these...

Does anyone remember the Paragons and the Jesters? In high falsetto voices they whined about the ache of first love way before I ever felt it. They prepared me for heartbreak in such a visceral way that I couldn’t wait for it to happen. Love? Was it going to come to...

Kenny Price’s objects are modest in size and endless in meaning, which is another way of saying they make you think and feel instead of just impressing you. At a recent career survey at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery’s inaugural LA show, the first piece you are confronted...

The most famous Hollywood movie I appeared in was Roger Corman's Death Race 2000, which was bizarre because coming from New York, I didn’t know how to drive yet. Over the years the movie became one of the most popular American films in Europe, including France....

These statues, never really alive, were visiting the Getty like ghosts from the past, and they have traveled an odd underwater route to get here. Afraid that these magnificent bronzes would be melted down into weaponry and coins, their owners dragged them out to sea...

School—the word alone makes me shiver. I was forced to go when I was five. “Forced” is an ugly, ugly word but sometimes it turns out for the better. In the ’50s I attended an all-girls school that focused on posture, a good translation of Cicero, and the perfect...

To attempt to improve upon nature can mean creating a monster, something we are quite accustomed to in the plastic surgery industry, as we are in love with artificiality. How did this happen? Boredom with nature? Love of our own capabilities? Maybe it’s not a bad...

It is depressing for me to think that most of my favorite art is a cold-hearted attempt at mind control. No, the Egyptians were not thinking only of beauty when they built the pyramids; they were thinking of death, and the power of intimidation. The little servant...

It seems the art critics think Andy Warhol’s Shadows painting (1978-79) at MOCA is the worst he has ever done—meaningless disco junk! One has to ask, if it is so terrible why would such a smart artist need 102 canvases to complete the series? Warhol himself called the...

A lover of Marsden Hartley’s landscapes, especially the “Dogtown” series, I have never been interested in his so-called cubist series depicting German symbols. Why would someone who could paint the mystical rhythms of Dogtown or the insane colors of the Mexican desert...

The inclusion of Emil Nolde in the excellent exhibition, “Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is a brilliant decision, though Nolde was not known for joining groups for very long. Many of his...

 The photographs at the Annenberg Space for Photography of National Geographic magazine are cinema-size, faces larger than life, their suffering and innocence unbearable but attached to your memory forever. There are also animals filled with destroyed beauty and a...