California design celebrated in clear context @ Design Museum event

Architecture & Design · Visual arts
It’s the cusp of autumn in Los Angeles and that means one thing: Museum of California Design director Bill Stern is cooking a glorious plein air event that’s sure to add beauty and aesthetics to our existence. Another year, another magnificent, architecturally significant California home where Bill will host his annual benefit and fundraiser. It’s ...

Colonoscopy 3

Ideas & Opinion · Visual arts
Everyone’s jumping on the high-speed train, oh wait, we don’t have one … everyone’s powering north in their cars on the killer Golden State Freeway. Destination, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso, and the Parisian Avant-Garde. The much-admired Gertrude Stein show adds to the ever-growing dump of evidence that ...

Vincent Price: “Shock” … and art

Film · Visual arts
A pretty decent selection of late-night movies — just what you need when you are strangely full of energy from about one till four am — is getting me through my post-China jet lag. Last night I whiled away the hours with “Shock,” a 1946 film noir starring horror guy Vincent Price as a dicey ...

L.A.’s artistic and cultural heritage vs. a rock 2

Film · Visual arts
Los Angeles, megalopolis, hosts a cool, vibrant and progressive art scene, an expression of its unique history and inimitable cultural mix. Many Angelenos will derive pleasure and meaning from Michael Heizer‘s Levitated/Slot Mass, a pyramidal granite boulder suspended on concrete rails above a pit carved into the northwest corner of the L.A. County Museum of ...

ROA, exceptional talent, to be featured in MOCA’s “Art in the Streets” 1

Visual arts
The precocious and prolific Belgian artist, ROA, is among the selected fifty to be featured in Art in the Streets, the first major U.S. museum exhibition dedicated to graffiti and street art, opening at the Museum of Contemporary Art on April 17. We first encountered ROA’s critters, and their innards, painted on cardboard, brick, and ...

Good god! Apollo visits Los Angeles, twice.

Dance · Visual arts
The bronze art treasure, Apollo Saettante, Apollo the Archer, is visiting Los Angeles through the summer, far from his home in the Real Museo Borbonico in Naples. The luminous statue arrived on the cliffs of Malibu, California, where he received a tender beauty treatment from Getty Museum conservationist Erik Risser and curator David Saunders, antiquities ...

Harry Houdini, who he? See: Skirball Center

Visual arts
Houdini: Art and Magic, coming soon to the Skirball Cultural Center, traces magician and escape artist Harry Houdini’s evolution from fledgling circus performer in the 1890s, to stage magician at the turn of the twentieth century, to star of stage and film. Featuring more than 150 artifacts, the exhibition illuminates Houdini’s compelling story through historical ...

Kalman show closing soon at Skirball

Visual arts
The whimsical flotsam and jetsam of the graphic designer, magazine illustrator, children’s book writer and tchotchke collector Maira Kalman is on view at the  Skirball Center through February 13. The impressive show, “Various Illuminations (of a Crazy World),” displays Kalman’s prodigious output. Yes, I bought Kalman’s illustrated Strunk and White at the gift shop. Because ...

Beato photography reveals beauty & brutality of the East-West encounter

Visual arts
Photographs by Felice Beato (1832–1909), an Italian-born rolling stone who roamed Asia in the latter half of the 19th century, are on view in a worthwhile exhibit at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Using his cumbersome camera and his good eye, Beato delivered to the West some of the first photo images of Asia’s exotic ...

Bloody mamas: violence against women in art and life

Dance · Film · Ideas & Opinion · Visual arts
Monday, November 15, 2010, was a grisly night for women in Los Angeles. Both in art and in life, the blood of women flowed unnaturally and to no good purpose. Shortly after midnight, Ronni Chasen, the owner of her own public relations firm and a hard-driving career woman, was found bleeding to death, crashed in ...