Kenny Price’s objects are modest in size and endless in meaning, which is another way of saying they make you think and feel instead of just impressing you. At a recent career survey at Parrasch Heijnen Gallery’s inaugural LA show, the first piece you are confronted...
The most famous Hollywood movie I appeared in was Roger Corman's Death Race 2000, which was bizarre because coming from New York, I didn’t know how to drive yet. Over the years the movie became one of the most popular American films in Europe, including France....
These statues, never really alive, were visiting the Getty like ghosts from the past, and they have traveled an odd underwater route to get here. Afraid that these magnificent bronzes would be melted down into weaponry and coins, their owners dragged them out to sea...
School—the word alone makes me shiver. I was forced to go when I was five. “Forced” is an ugly, ugly word but sometimes it turns out for the better. In the ’50s I attended an all-girls school that focused on posture, a good translation of Cicero, and the perfect...
To attempt to improve upon nature can mean creating a monster, something we are quite accustomed to in the plastic surgery industry, as we are in love with artificiality. How did this happen? Boredom with nature? Love of our own capabilities? Maybe it’s not a bad...
It is depressing for me to think that most of my favorite art is a cold-hearted attempt at mind control. No, the Egyptians were not thinking only of beauty when they built the pyramids; they were thinking of death, and the power of intimidation. The little servant...
Narrative art is art that holds a story in it. It is as old as a simple clay bowl that holds life-giving water. The narrative art that most effected me, at a tender age and for the rest of my life, were the pictures by Kay Nielsen that I saw in my fairy tale book,...
It seems the art critics think Andy Warhol’s Shadows painting (1978-79) at MOCA is the worst he has ever done—meaningless disco junk! One has to ask, if it is so terrible why would such a smart artist need 102 canvases to complete the series? Warhol himself called the...
A lover of Marsden Hartley’s landscapes, especially the “Dogtown” series, I have never been interested in his so-called cubist series depicting German symbols. Why would someone who could paint the mystical rhythms of Dogtown or the insane colors of the Mexican desert...
Gallery MovesIt’s a Californian Kinda ThingBy Scarlet Cheng It’s hard to keep up with the rash of new and relocated galleries this year—is this because of the economic rebound, or because Los Angeles continues to become more important in American’s cultural...
Narrative art has been displaced in recent decades, not simply from the modern art canon but from serious consideration in the contemporary fine art context, generally—which is somewhat ironic, since it dominates the Western art historical canon through the 16th...
The inclusion of Emil Nolde in the excellent exhibition, “Expressionism in Germany and France: From Van Gogh to Kandinsky” at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, is a brilliant decision, though Nolde was not known for joining groups for very long. Many of his...
The photographs at the Annenberg Space for Photography of National Geographic magazine are cinema-size, faces larger than life, their suffering and innocence unbearable but attached to your memory forever. There are also animals filled with destroyed beauty and a...
I heard a rumor that some artists went to visit Henri Rousseau and were shocked that he put one of his paintings on the floor for them to walk on because he didn’t have a rug. Was he naive? Crazy? Suffering from low self-esteem? It doesn’t matter. He was unique and so...
I was sitting in my car when I heard that Lou Reed had died. The announcer went on to say that although Reed was not as famous as the Beatles or the Eagles, blah, blah—I almost rear end the car in front of me. Not as famous as the milquetoast-I-Wanna-Hold-Your-Hand...
If sex has been around in art for so long, then why do O’Keeffe’s vulvalistic flowers generate so much special negative attention, as in the phrase, “Yeah, she’s good but I don’t like her—too obvious, too sexual.”? Is this because her sensually-charged paintings of...
For me, Claude Monet stands between two of my favorite artists who played with the disintegration of the object rather than its creation: J.M.W. Turner and Anselm Kiefer. Turner’s objects sailed forth only to be obliterated by light as if they were Viking funeral...
Hooking up with Margie Schnibbe LA Studio Visit by Ezrha Jean Black / Edit Margie Schnibbe has a jungle thing going on in the front reception area of her house, as it seems to »read more IN LOVE WITH THE ANIMALS Chris Kraus tours Mexicali with neo-muralist Fernando...
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