Art
Mind Your Awareness
LOS ANGELES — As I made my way to the Hammer Museum, I was very aware of the fact that I would arrive late to the event — but something told me to go anyway.
Alicia Eler
Alicia Eler is a cultural critic and arts reporter at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and author of "The Selfie Generation: How Our Self-Images Are Changing Our Notions of Privacy, Sex, Consent, and Culture" (2017).
Art
Don’t Turn Your Back on Selfies
LOS ANGELES — A selfie says a thousand words, especially when it’s taken with a longtime friend. We’ve all taken selfies to commemorate something together; it’s as if the moment doesn’t exist if we didn’t take that photo. Some selfie situations are more intense than others, however.
Interview
An Androgynous Suffragette Portrait, Rediscovered
LOS ANGELES — Mind-altering conversations happen by chance, randomly, when we are least expecting them to occur.
Art
When Depression Strikes
LOS ANGELES — It was 4:20pm when I walked into Depression and encountered Andrea Ursuta’s piece “Stoner” (2013). A batting-cage ball-throwing machine creaked on, spun once, and died before it could eject anything from its quarantined-off belly.
Art
This Is Your Selfie Reality
LOS ANGELES — What’s the best thing about selfies right now? That they are everywhere, and there’s nothing you can do to stop them. According to the internet, selfies are both the cause and effect of many social issues today.
Art
The Curious Thing about #Hashtags
The new web series #Hashtag follows the lives of young queer women in Chicago whose dating patterns and attractions are significantly affected by the technologies that they use and, at times, abuse.
Books
Duh, It’s Postmodern Poetry
Jon Rutzmoser’s thin book of poetry packed with thick descriptions of dicks, dire and dramatic Oedipal complexes, heavy-petting psychoanalytic theory references, and Disneyland descriptors made me laugh, pissed me off, had me rolling my eyes, and had me wondering what it means to write poetry today.
Art
Selfie Illusions
LOS ANGELES — How do we talk about real shit online? In the selfie world, where we become two-dimensional representations of ourselves as we would like to be seen, it's sometimes not possible to do more than just like, reblog, retweet, ignore, or simply comment.
Art
Laboring Over Walead Beshty's Bodies
LOS ANGELES — Walead Beshty’s solo exhibition at Regen Projects, Selected Bodies of Work, claims to “address bodies and labor as they are rendered visible in or on the art object.” Where and what are these bodies and labor?
Art
Documenting Indigenous Americans
LOS ANGELES — Between the years 1907 and 1930, Edward Sheriff Curtis published The North American Indian, a record of traditional Indian cultures in the United States and Canada. Curtis’ book, a landmark historical document with a foreword by Theodore Roosevelt, has been digitized and his photograph
Art
Seeing Past Portland's Whiteness
LOS ANGELES — I didn't mean for my trip to Portland to have such a focus on race.
Art
Not Your Average Selfie
LOS ANGELES — Non-celebrities are more innovative with the selfie because all eyes are not (yet) on them.