The digital artist known as Beeple sold an NFT for $69 million in cyptocurrency at Christie’s auction in March, 2021. The media treated this grotesque sale as if it revolutionized the art world, but if we separate reality from the hysterical hype, it clearly has not. An NFT stands for a “non-fungible token”—probably the most ridiculous acronym ever invented by digital geeks. An NFT is nothing...
In the midst of the Revolution of 1917, fiery Bolshevik Leon Trotsky warned members of the Menshevik party that their moderate methods in the revolutionary world would relegate them to history’s “dustbin.” In an ironic appropriation six decades later, Ronald Reagan declared that Marxism and Leninism were destined for the “ash heap” of history. These two historical figures were, of course,...
To incarnate is to become embodied in form, and form follows function. From the outset of the year 2020, leadership at the Women’s Center for Creative Work began the task of expanding its physical form because they had had the good fortune of having outgrown their existing space. Born out of a series of successful “site-specific feminist dinner parties” in the Los Angeles area, the wishes of the...
I met David Horvitz three years ago when he hand-delivered me an edamame plant he had been offering to his community via social media. Now, three years later, we meet again to conduct this interview in the garden he has been building. The garden in question is a previously vacant lot in Arlington Heights, a neighborhood in Central Los Angeles, near the Underground Museum and his studio. The lot,...
Emily Barker (who uses they/them pronouns) is an artist and disability activist living in Los Angeles. They received their BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and have given talks at prestigious institutions including the Royal Academy of Art and UCLA. Barker adamantly refuses the low quality of life a disabled person is expected to endure and, although critical of the systems...
As with many works of contemporary art, Claudia Keep’s compact paintings first entered my field of vision on social media, where her imagery retains its appeal, even as her textured, varicolored and economical brushstrokes are flattened out. Keep often makes blunt...
As our rushing descent into global environmental catastrophe continues, we are inundated with images of our planet's suffering. We’ve all seen the snapshots—a man up to his neck in water pushing children on a downed satellite dish during the 2022 flooding of...
Spectacular and sinuous, Ann Weber’s large-scale sculptures create a mythic world, one that viewers step within and explore as if moving through a strange and lovely forest of anthropomorphic shapes. Created entirely from cardboard strips, the sculptures are woven...
Global pandemics democratize pain, suffering and loss. Therefore, who does one turn to when inquiring about world-reshaping events that impact the interpersonal and economic fabric of society? The answer is artists as they function as visual ethnographic historians....
Inclining towards controlled madness while also surveying the forces to which we may dutifully acquiesce, Sascha Braunig's painting exhibition, “Poseuses,” at François Ghebaly, vividly replicates matrices of power that one can experience both personally and within the...