LOS ANGELES — Did you play with Legos as a kid? I did, and so did a lot of other former kids who are now grown-ups. Some of those grown-ups have become artists, and it’s been fascinating to see what they’ve been up to.
July 2012
Posted inOpinion
The Museum of Endangered Sounds
Brendan Chilcutt’s Museum of Endangered Sounds is an online, interactive museum of the old sounds from outdated technology.
Posted inOpinion
Required Reading
This week, the first photo ever uploaded to the internet, MOCA drama continues, art theft for amateurs, a public art tour in lower Manhattan, Knoedler gets sued again, Damien Hirst in Burger King, Ai Weiwei’s blogger battle and more.
Posted inArt
Watcher from the Skies: Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park Series
Beginning in 1968, in an act of governmental largesse unlikely to be repeated any time soon, the Bureau of Reclamation of the U.S. Department of the Interior invited forty artists, all expenses paid, to create works documenting its water reclamation efforts in the West. Among those asked to participate was Richard Diebenkorn, who traveled in 1970 to the Columbia River valley and Salt River in Arizona for five days of expansive looking, taking in landscape views from a promontory and making several overhead passes in a helicopter. Long fascinated by aerial perspective, he found himself “boggled” by what he saw. “Whenever there was agriculture going on,” he later recalled, “you could see process — ghosts of former tilled fields, patches of land being eroded.”
Posted inArt
Single Point Perspective: How To Join The Club and Live Happily Ever After
Lichtenstein and Warhol might have been using the same source material, but they were hardly after the same things, as the latter’s subsequent work would quickly make clear.
Posted inArt
Boyz 2 Men: A Detroit Artist’s Sonic Youth
So much iconic American literature portrays, often humorously, neglected or badly treated boys doggedly tracking down adventure (Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, Nick Adams). For these protagonists, play is not a luxury but a lifeline. Matt Zacharias’ episodic, mixed-media exhibition Childhood, Boyhood, Sonic Youth is just such a journey. The show starts off with a search for dad, or at least for things solid and male, but winds up somewhere else.
Posted inArt
The Secret Life of Paintings
Last weekend in a Doylestown, Pennsylvania—which boasts not one but two locally owned, well-stocked bookstores—I picked up an old Phaidon edition of Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy for ten bucks.
Posted inArt
Mark Boulos at MoMA: “All that Is Solid Melts into Air”
Mark Boulos’s two-projector video installation at MoMA, “All that Is Solid Melts into Air” (2008), is a chilling investigation into two separate but entwined worlds.
Posted inArt
Good Intentions and Big Ideas: Feel Good Grants That Exploit Artists and Reduce Arts Funding
The people behind the ZERO1 Fellowship got one thing right — “public policy is increasingly ill-equipped to manage a society with the kind of boundless creativity that technology like the Internet enables.” What they seem to get wrong is the notion that this is a grant program that serves to directly benefit the arts, or at least one artist.
Posted inOpinion
Overheard in the Art World
Every Friday (or so), we post things in “Overheard in the Art World.” #OHAW Honestly, art world, don’t take yourself so seriously.
Posted inNews
No Room for Old Masters in Berlin
Berlin wants to move a trove of Old Masters paintings to make way for a collection of surrealist art. Jeffrey Hamburger has started a petition in protest.
Posted inNews
Comics Museum Closes Its Doors (But Will Return)
This week, a lesser-known MoCCA — not LA MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) or New York’s MOCA, aka the Museum of Chinese in America — abruptly closed its doors. MoCCA stands for the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art, which until Monday was housed in suite 401 at 594 Broadway, in Nolita.
