LOS ANGELES — It took a while for me to actually sit down and stop flipping through the channels and start leafing through Sara Cwynar’s gorgeous book, The Kitsch Encyclopedia.
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 inOpinion
Warhol’s Little Red Face Book
LOS ANGELES — The name Andy Warhol is synonymous with Pop art, a movement often written off as apolitical and shallow in its engagement with American culture. Reflections of this assumption are all contained in Little Red Book #296, an album of 18 images that was recently gifted to Tulsa’s Philbrook Museum of Art.
Posted inArt
Exposing the Blood and Guts of Hollywood’s Teen Girl Fantasy
LOS ANGELES — Laura Parnes’s four-disk video series Blood and Guts in Hollywood exposes the idealized teenage dream for what it is: A boring, vapid fantasy of “love” that is marketed and sold to an audience of young dreamers searching for their soulmate in the illusions of silver screens and false idols.
Posted inArt
In the Spirit of Summer Memories
LOS ANGELES — The summer months are a time of slowing down, going out, hitting the beach, and drinking far too many iced coffee beverages. And yes, I even remember you., a five-person group show at Aran Cravey Gallery curated by Eric Kim, wraps up the summer season nicely, reminding visitors of the slippery line between personal stories and broader histories.
Posted inOpinion
Ancient Statues Pose for Selfies
It’s one thing to take a #museumselfie with a work of art, as if to say, “yes, I was here with this artwork” or “yes, here is my reflection in the surface of this piece.” It’s another thing to make Greco-Roman statues look like they were chiseled specifically for selfie-shooting moments.
Posted inArt
Artists Present Alternative Instagram Models
LOS ANGELES — The art world has a lot of feelings about Instagram. On a humid Saturday night in Los Angeles, the roving cultural hub ForYourArt spilled their #instaguts about it all through the Instagram Mini-Marathon.
Posted inArt
Minor White’s Vulnerability
LOS ANGELES — Minor White’s photographs offer a portrait of a life lived in collaboration with the natural world, other people, and the great beyond. This collection of crisp photographs make up the retrospective Manifestations of the Spirit.
Posted inArt
Curating the Mind of John Altoon
LOS ANGELES — In John Altoon’s current retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, curator Carol S. Eliel organizes a view of this Los Angeles artist’s work that spans from his early beginnings in art — heavy strokes of more Cubist-type work — to his delicate, sexually charged ink and watercolors leading up to his death.
Posted inArt
This Journal Is Not a Market
LOS ANGELES — Here’s the problem: “It is how people come to see art as a tool, a flavor, or a device.” So says Charlie White, editor of The Enemy, a triannual online journal that publishes long-form essays on criticism, social science, poetry, celebrity, and other cultural interests.
Posted inArt
June Wayne’s Farewell
LOS ANGELES — June Wayne’s retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of California Art is a tightly curated, chronologically arranged exhibition of paintings, prints, tapestries, and video by a founder of the feminist art movement.
Posted inArt
It’s a Bitchy World
LOS ANGELES — The self-titled exhibition and zine release Bitches Rule, Cycle 3 is nestled in the back of & Pens Press, an art bookstore in Culver City set to become a roving/pop-up shop and online gallery come June 2.
Posted inArt
The Last Selfie
LOS ANGELES — It’s the end of selfies as we know it. Dearest selfie fanatics, this will be my last story for the Hyperallergic selfie column; after one year of chronicling the selfie’s rise to fame, we collectively decided to let this investigation go off into the netherlands of internet data trails.