AX Mina is an artist and culture writer exploring contemporary spirituality, technology and other sundry topics. She co-produces Five and Nine, a podcast about magic, work, and economic justice, and serves on the board of the Rabkin Foundation.
Opinion
Maybe there's something to Lana Del Rey's "Summertime Sadness" song: summer can sometimes be an intense, heavy season, so perhaps that is why two recent articles have been dipping their toes into the pool of complex emotion that is contemporary life.
Opinion
"Work that fails to enter a canon — literary, historical, or otherwise — tends to languish on the dustier shelves of college libraries. Digitization allows a new generation of scholars to look at them with fresh regard."
Art
LOS ANGELES — The City of Angels is famously opaque to the average visitor. Unlike New York, the vibe of Los Angeles doesn't reveal itself immediately after you step out of the subway. It doesn't even reveal itself after a few months.
Opinion
SAN FRANCISCO — Recently, I stumbled upon the Descriptive Camera, a project by artist Matt Richardson that harkens back to the days when we could simply describe an image without showing it.
Opinion
SAN FRANCISCO — Pollution and health have been on the Chinese mind as of late. From dead pigs in Shanghai to tips for avoiding bad air in Beijing, a clean environment can be difficult to find. Smog and water pollution have become a feature of China's urban landscape, creating a hazard not just for C
Opinion
SAN FRANCISCO — Many artists I know are incredibly ambitious. They want to be the best, the most effective artist they can be. And if they move to a large city with a supportive gallery and museum system, they can turn that ambition into career success.
Opinion
SAN FRANCISCO — Just as design is often seen as an afterthought for new technologies, art is often seen as superfluous to the more quantifiable work behind social change and the rhetorical and charismatic qualities of change leaders.
Art
SAN FRANCISCO — As interest in China grows, so does interest in its art scene. And while I've met countless artists in the US who have wanted to travel to China, the barriers to access remain high, due to language, culture, and cost.
Art
Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of commissioned essays for The World’s First Tumblr Art Symposium on Saturday, March 9, 2013. When I sent my first email in the 1990s, the internet was just beginning to hit the mainstream. The idea that we would use the internet to talk to friends we kn
Art
LOS ANGELES — Games are everywhere these days. We keep them in our phones, our computers, our television sets. Where once we could content ourselves with a small selection of board games and a pack of cards, we now have a myriad of games at our fingertips, ready to download or purchase at a moment's
Opinion
LOS ANGELES — In places like the US and Korea, it can be easy to rely entirely on the internet. Upload something to Dropbox, download it to your server, let it live on the cloud. But in many parts of the world with unreliable or censored internets, people rely on USB sticks and SD cards to transfer
Opinion
LOS ANGELES — A few weeks ago, I wrote a bit about the potential for open arts journalism, asking if it's a trend to watch. Journalists and those interested in the field have been discussing openness for a while now, but I've not seen as much discussion in terms of the arts. What could an open journ