Where cities are being built up and money spent, local legislation has often passed a percent-for-art program; alternately, cities look to create stable partnerships between the public and private sectors, so some of that money is made available for public art, too. In the past, this has meant producing somewhat conventional monuments and commemorative images. Since the 1980s, public art...
At Esplanade Pierre Vidal-Naquet, l’Université Paris Diderot, Paris. Nancy Rubins,Monochrome for Paris, 2013,stainless steel and aluminum, approximately 40 x 50 x 40 feet,photograph by Erich Koyama,©Nancy Rubins.
The South Coast Repertory Theater’s production of Red, John Logan’s Tony Award winning play about abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko, which opened in Costa Mesa on January 22, is directed by SCR’s Founding Artistic Director David Emmes and stars Angeleno Mark Harelik as Rothko. Harelik, a tall, slender man with a full head of hair, shaved the top half of his head and adopted a slightly...
Not all films about artists and the art world are silly, but most of them are. To paraphrase a Mark Twain quote, “There are lies, damned lies, and films about artists and the art world.” (Twain linked “statistics” with lies and damned lies.) From such films as the Vincent van Gogh epic Lust for Life (1956) to the Michelangelo biopic The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), we get overripe portrayals...
In an episode of Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Louis CK takes Seinfeld out on his boat on the Hudson River. Looking across the water and admiring the skyline, Louis says, “New York makes me crazy. I love New York City. I love the different brick colors and the water towers.” It is a telling observation for the most part because it is not funny nor is it meant to be. It...
Tim Hawkinson is full of surprises. He is an idiosyncratic artist who is at once a master craftsman, a scientist and a tinkerer who has an amazing facility with a wide range of materials and mediums. His works are precise and cerebral, yet often about the imprecisions...
As the omicron variant tightens its grip on the world, it seems like the light at the end of the tunnel is receding, evading us once again. For the first time in a long time, I recalled the anxious uncertainty that became all too familiar to us all in the early throes...
Hilary Baker calls her current show at Rory Devine Fine Art, Predators—which we might loosely define as any species that dares to assert its presence amongst the invasive, marauding, and all-devouring species of apex-predators, we know as humans. Baker’s subtitle is,...
Doubtless you’ve seen the billboards: the Immersive Van Gogh exhibit has shown in cities across North America, and now it’s Los Angeles’ turn. It’s Time To Gogh! commands the sign, and I oblige, stepping into the old Amoeba building on Sunset Boulevard, which will...
Independence. Freedom. Unchecked mobility. We’re quick to attribute these qualities to the automobile: grand, sweeping, all-encompassing statements that turn the machine into an intractable, totalizing force to be glimpsed from the outside-in. We think less about the...