LOS ANGELES — As a woman who was once a teenage girl, I have a certain fondness for any filmic or visual art that harkens back to that time of intense, unbridled feelings, awkward physical changes, and sexual desires running wild ’n free.
Author Archives: Alicia Eler
Alicia Eler is a cultural critic and arts reporter. She is the author of the book The Selfie Generation (Skyhorse Publishing), which has been reviewed in the New York Times, WIRED Magazine and the Chicago Tribune. A native of Chicago by way of L.A., Alicia's writing has also been published in Glamour, the Guardian, CNN, Hyperallergic, Art21 Magazine, LA Weekly, and Aperture. She is currently the visual art critic/arts reporter at the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Posted inBooks
Supercharged Sex and Corporate Control in a Queer Erotic Novel
In My Wet Hot Drone Summer, anti-surveillance activists defeating corporate overlords is strangely sexy.
Posted inArt
Inhabiting Other People’s Recorded Memories
The group exhibition Memory Burn at bitforms gallery, curated by Chris Romero, explores the devices we use to record our lives as we confront mortality and death.
Posted inArt
Breathing Life into a High-Tech, Glowing Sphere
Back in the late ’90s, I considered going to raves.
Posted inArt
From Cum Shots to Orgasmic GIFs, a Playful Take on Virtual Sex
Faith Holland’s show TECHNOPHILIA at Transfer Gallery left me wanting more, kind of like I imagine a good dick pic would.
Posted inArt
California Artists Address Coast-to-Coast Political Struggles
What goes West must always return East because New York is still the center of the American art market.
Posted inArt
Performance Artists Use Stand-Up Tropes, but Not For Laughs
LOS ANGELES — There’s nothing funny about art. Writing art criticism is a serious endeavor. But at some point, the performance of professionalism in the art world just started to feel like one big joke.
Posted inArt
An Aquatic Video Performance Immerses Us in the California Drought
LOS ANGELES — Imagine that you are trying to get dressed underwater but every time you lift your arms the water you’re wading through pulls them back down.
Posted inArt
Your Art Entertainment Experience Is Here!
MONTRÉAL — In the 24/7 news cycle of BuzzFeed, the Huffington Post, and every other “content producer” on the internet, there is a fine line between news and entertainment.
Posted inBooks
Someone Made a Book of #artselfies
The selfie exists everywhere that people own smartphones. DIS Magazine’s #artselfie, published by Jean Boîte Éditions, attempts to freeze one aspect of this cultural moment — the art selfie — by parlaying its meaning into a gleaming, print-only book
Posted inArt
When Consumer Goods Blossom into Otherworldly Fungi
LOS ANGELES — Benjamin Lord’s grossly delectable photographs, on view in his exhibition The New Retail Mycology at Monte Vista Projects, invite viewers to closely consider the social construction of a landscape.
Posted inArt
An Artist Turns Surveillance into Affection
LOS ANGELES — Artist Jennifer Moon is not the first or the last to experiment with self-surveillance, documenting selfies of her every moment for anyone and no one.