Fresh (if that’s the word for it) from the carbon cycle conundrums posed by the FotoFest 2016 Biennial in Houston, I faced the ambivalence of ‘homecoming’ between LACMA and the Getty Museum, returning to, if not the ‘haunts’ of my mole-dark youth, certainly a few of...
Happy New Year, dear reader(s). I know I was living up to the blog title just a bit excessively in the last month of this just past year; but I wasn’t just staying at home. First of all, there was Norma – the Los Angeles Opera’s production of Bellini’s classic tale of...
It is that most fundamental of human needs – our need to make sense of things, to report, describe and explain the world; which itself may be at the core of our social and cultural needs, perhaps the basis of society and culture – the need to bring order to our lives...
We don’t call it ‘AWOL’ for nothing, you know. So while you (and my editors) were all HOWLing for my updates last week – and oh yes, we did have a few – the local art world news was eclipsed by the Los Angeles Review of Books’ publication of Joseph Giovannini’s...
[Part I of this post appeared yesterday, following the preceding evening’s Third Los Angeles forum at Occidental College. I continue where I left off – as LACMA’s Director, Michael Govan left the stage to the evening’s host, the forum’s principal organizer, and Los...
And so the Govan/Zumthor/LACMA PR juggernaut thunders on, steamrolling over those skeptical eyes looking over their shoulders from near and far, critics and other local scolds (and possibly its immediate neighbors), to say nothing of its own Board of Trustees, the...
It has not escaped me that the order of these posts keeps keeps getting juggled as one thing or another interrupts the chronological flow. (Or perhaps it’s the ‘controversial’ flow—as controversy is what frequently drives this conversation forward.) But occasionally...
“I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.” Don Vito Corleone to Johnny Fontane, The Godfather (Paramount, 1972) written by Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo, from the novel by Mario Puzo, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. As visitors to this blog are aware,...
I threw a bit of ink (or the digital equivalent) around the topic of LACMA in the last post—its fabulous summer of art exhibitions, its fabulous trustees and director, and their plans for an even more fabulous east campus—perhaps inspired by that solar swimming pool...
I think it’s safe to say that LACMA is on something of ‘a roll,’ lately. The sheer critical mass of masterpiece art on view this summer, especially on the west side of the campus, seems almost enough to shift the center of gravity of metropolitan Los Angeles – or at...
"What's with the God look?” I had thought to ask him at one point over the course of a rambling interview conducted in the lead-up to LACMA’s opening of his retrospective—provocatively, ironically titled, “Pure Beauty.” A slightly exaggerated (to say nothing of...
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