Nowhere in the museums’ advertising blitzkrieg for the performance were we told to bring our wildfire-season masks as well as our covid masks, and covid masks don’t prevent smoke inhalation.
Larissa Archer
Larissa Archer is a writer and theatre worker based in San Francisco. Her website is www.larissaarcher.com.
Posted inArt
The Unsung Heroes of Burning Man Go Unnoticed
A host of creative, kind, brave, funny people go unsung in No Spectators, which is centered on a narrow, affluent segment of the Burning Man population.
Posted inArt
John Waters Curates a Show of Low-Tech Art in Silicon Valley
SAN FRANCISCO — There’s something deliciously subversive about an old-guard, establishment art gallery mounting an adamantly low-tech, analogue art show that celebrates dysfunction, messiness, and thwarted purpose, and doing it at the vortex of an industry that fetishizes streamlined, enhanced, digitized functionality.
Posted inArt
A Seashell Temple, a Glowflower Tree, and More Art Adventures at Burning Man
The ephemeral circumstances of the festival and the disposition (natural, habituated, or chemically enhanced) of so many attendees creates an unusual environment for viewing and engaging with art.
Posted inArt
How Urban Sprawl Created a Homogenous and Hostile World
LOS ANGELES — The list of ways the US has negatively influenced the rest of the world is long and shameful: unnecessary, interminable wars, nutritionally inane fast-food chains, a habit of wasteful consumption based on instant obsolescence. The list goes on, and one can see why at least some of our exports caught on.
Posted inArt
J.M.W. Turner, the Sublime, and Me
LOS ANGELES — “You don’t experience the sublime looking through double glazing, or at a distant electric storm, or watching a sea rage on TV.”
Posted inBooks
The Sibling Rivalry that Shaped Diane Arbus’s Vision
In Silent Dialogues, art historian Alexander Nemerov, son of former US Poet Laureate Howard Nemerov and nephew of Diane Arbus, traces his father’s evolving attitudes toward photography and his sister’s work in particular.
Posted inBooks
Mapplethorpe’s Other Man
In Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe, Philip Gefter’s new biography of collector, curator, and market force Sam Wagstaff, the author argues that it was not only his subject’s life that was transformed by his relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe.