Articles
THOUGHTFUL SPECTACLES Made in L.A. 2023: ACTS OF LIVING" at The Hammer
They say how a person does one thing is how they do everything, and the most recent edition of the Hammer Museum’s biennial, “Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living” (its sixth), put the axiom into practice. Curators Diana Nawi and Pablo José Ramírez, along with Luce Curatorial Fellow Ashton Cooper, proceeded from the intriguing perspective of selecting artists whose work deal in some essential way with the fabric of everyday life, both on an intimate, individual scale and with a broader, rhizomatic sense of culture as community. There were multiple examples of very fine contemporary painting, updates to vernacular genres of portrait and...
ILLUMINATIONS WITHOUT LIMIT "William Blake: Visionary" At the Getty
William Blake embodies a wild paradox in Western cultural history. The only great poet who was also a gifted painter, Blake was a barely educated autodidact whose ideas anticipated Freud, Marx and Einstein. Never published in his lifetime, The Tyger (1795) is now the most frequently taught lyric poem in American and British high schools and universities. His lifetime (1757–1827) dates him with the English Romantics, yet he had little or no connection with the “Romantic ” movement or with any movement at all except that of the mythological figures he saw so clearly in his mind. The current show at the Getty respects this paradox by embracing...
BEST IN SHOW: ARTILLERY 2023 TOP TEN
Breathless is not always an indication of on-coming medical crisis or pathology. Events (including cultural events) can stop us short or knock the wind out of us. And although the experience may be more common at live music events, it happens in galleries and museums, too. But at the close of 2023, the breathlessness we may have experienced intermittently in galleries blurs with a breathlessness we now encounter on an almost daily basis. The dark days of Fall 2023 are giving way to a spectral winter at the start of a political year where it seems as if the entire planet hangs in the balance. Whether or not we saw this darkness specifically...
Scarlet Cheng’s Top Films of 2023 Fantasy Takes the Lead
What a year for feature films this has been, both rich and strange. Indeed, fantasy seemed to have taken the lead, as we emerge from the fever of the COVID epidemic and try to find the new normal. These were not the usual escapist fantasies, but fantasies that spoke to our current, more conscious and more precarious state of being. Below are my personal choices for the best, in alphabetic order—films that combined elevation and inspiring form and content. While I selected these without consideration of director, there are many veteran auteurs among them—from long established ones such as Hayao Miyazaki and Martin Scorsese to relative...
Miami Art Week Report: Day 4 New Art Dealers Alliance Fair and a very Miami party
As Art Week races to a close, yesterday I headed downtown across the dreaded, traffic-filled bridge to the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) fair for my final full day here in Miami. While the fair opened on Tuesday, the busy week of competing events prevented me from getting there until Thursday. Really, it was the thought of sitting in gridlock traffic to cross the bridge that kept me away. As always, this year’s edition did not disappoint. Featuring over 150 galleries, nonprofits, and art spaces from across the world, as well as a robust schedule of programming and events, this year’s fair was as exciting and diverse as ever. Known for...
