On a quiet, hilly residential street in Echo Park, behind an unassuming fence, there is a cathedral to freewheeling sexuality, a place where art and sex mingle to such an extent it can be hard to tell the difference. Most Angelenos will be familiar with the Tom of Finland House, the charming 1912 gabled Craftsman where artist Touko Laaksonen drew thousands of horny pictures of cartoonishly sexy...
With one notable exception, the original cast of This Is Spinal Tap were wildly successful thespians playing complete fuckups. Arguably the most iconic character of the lot, the exploding drummer “played” by everyman Ric Parnell, was another story altogether. The tall, angular skin pounder shown pondering the fate of his predecessors—while lounging in a bubble bath with a shower cap on his...
I’m not sure exactly when I accepted that the future of contemporary art belongs to the furries. It likely happened at the waterfront rave in Pittsburgh—where, flanked by gyrating, half-clad wolves and sexy tigers—I spent the late hours of July 4th lounging with a collective of anthropomorphic artists, dangling our legs over the dark waters of the Allegheny River and talking big ideas, until we...
For decades, art and fashion have occupied parallel but distinct tracks. There have been moments of convergence—think Oskar Schlemmer’s Bauhaus ballet costumes, Salvador Dalí’s sartorial collaborations with Elsa Schiaparelli, and Keith Haring’s “Pop Shop”—but the art world generally likes to consider itself above the fickle trends and blatant commercialism of fashion, while fashion, even at its...
We asked 12 artists to show us their shoes...
The news of BLUM’s abrupt closure after 30 years in Los Angeles reframed the landmark gallery’s final exhibition, Wilhelm Sasnal’s “AAAsphalt,” into an inadvertent elegy for contemporary art in Los Angeles. Entering the massive complex on an early July afternoon, I...
The night I saw Kaoru Ueda’s self-titled show at Nonaka-Hill, I found myself later at a friend’s house watching YouTube videos of marine life. The viewing experience of the vibrating patterned creatures felt nearly identical to Ueda’s obsessively precise paintings of...
To read a novel is to play detective. The detective novel leverages this symmetry: the reader identifies with Sherlock Holmes’s or Philip Marlowe’s driving curiosity. Our favorite sleuths want to get to the heart of the crime; we want to get to the end of the story....
The seminal Jeffrey Deitch exhibition “Post Human” (presented in 1992 and reimagined in 2024) explored evolving concepts of identity in the digital era. “The Abstract Future” feels in some ways like its spiritual sequel. Brilliantly curated by Alia Dahl, the gallery’s...
In the shadow of social media, describing a nude portrait of a woman as “authentic” or “not performative” is often a subliminal way of acknowledging that the image has been composed according to an “alternative” set of stylistic constraints: soft, flattering lighting;...