Before I forget, if you want to write anything for the next issue of Coagula, March 4 is the deadline.

Went to a ton of galleries today, was sifting through notes and stuff, will write it all up over the course of the next few days. Suffice to say that pizza in Larchmont Village and sushi in Little Tokyo beat out all of the art - although so many galleries were installing for shows, it was hard to tell. If you bend over to look at art, there is a certain “who bows for whom?” play going on. The only exception to “good food / bad art” was the DeKooning drawing show at MOCA. It was so tremendous, I may be forced to confine my review to the print edition.

Got home and saw the new issue of ArtScene had arrived. I have a three page article imploring people not to go to art school on some mad quest to be an art star. But you do what you want. You can accuse me of majoring in hypocrisy, as I will be speaking Monday night at CSLB at two of critic Chris Miles’ classes.

You have a lot of mood swings. One day you’re almond, the next you’re crunchy. Make up your mind! People can always find you, since you’re just that cool. Or not.

Uh oh. After posting yesterday’s critique of critic Chris Miles, he emailed me today offering to have a college he teaches at pay me to come down for the day and do studio visits with the student artists, and maybe give a little lecture.

Of course, part of me is tempted to discreetly remove yesterday’s post, but I won’t. Either he reads it and respects my right to my own informed opinion, he reads it and says “say sayonara to the dinero,” or he doesn’t read it at all. Best of all for Chris Miles would be that he already read it and he offered me the gig anyway.

See, almost everyone in the art world avoids ever speaking their minds in order to avoid threatening the offers that may come their way. But I know the only reason any offers come my way is because I can be counted on to tell the truth as i see it, not as it is convenient to my career. If it worked for me, why wouldn’t it work for you? Too many people start worrying about guarding their careers before they ever have one.

I had a weird dream that involved Jason Rhoads. Last week, a friend of mine vehemently disagreed with the Jungian belief that each person in your dreams represents a part of your self (A parent in your dream would thus represent your inner parental-like controls). I have to agree now, maybe the Jungian interpretation is wrong. What could Jason Rhoads possibly represent in my psychological makeup? My inner-asshole, maybe. Do I have an inner careerist sycophant? My inner repressed homosexual overeater? Amateur psychologists/art critics are welcome to email their interpretations.

Bad L.A. Art Critic #1
I don’t get Chris Miles. The longer he stays in the position of reviewing L.A. shows for ArtForum, the more he seems to be doing it in his sleep. There was a show Richard Prince paintings at Patrick Painter Gallery. It was beyond awful. What Prince used to do was paint - in precise font-lettering - bad jokes, famously tacky one-liners. They were rendered in a slick art, a commentary on irony and the inability of art to go beyond one-liners.

But suddenly, after a painting-heavy economic boom leaves his slicker-than-thou style in the dust, Prince discovers expressionistic painting - or at least he manners a blase brushstrokey background and then silkscreens his bad jokes on top of monster canvasses with the requisite soaked and splattered background. Basically, selling signature style but emoting a little so it looks like a good painting should over your couch. Totally cynical.

But Chris Miles uses these descriptions in his review:

fearless embrace of heroic scale
but that are also good paintings
methodical exploration of the medium
serious and provocative
paint handling that borrows from the best early Stella, Poons, and Olitski
continuing their tradition of searching for currency in painting.

This is the best recent example of a critic kissing bluechip ass. This pointless showcasing of pure product didn’t necessarily merit a bad review - no review at all would have sufficed - you think since Chris is a art college teacher he knows a little about interesting new artists - why shoot your wad on the has-beens of the 1980s? Believe me, this was mediocre, afterthought painting.

I am an Asteroid. I am a drifter. I go where life leads, which makes me usually a very calm and content sort of person. That or thoroughly apathetic. Usually I keep on doing whatever I’m doing, and it takes something special to make me change my mind. What Video Game Character Are You?

Bad L.A. Art Critic #2
About seven years ago LA Times art writer Christopher Knight castigated the Santa Monica Museum for allowing a show at the non-profit institution to be curated by then-commercial-gallerist Sue Spaid. The current show at the Santa Monica Museum is a showcase for three artists belonging to commercial gallerist Gavin Brown. While he has hardly converted into a rah rah booster of capitalism, Knight’s thinly veiled (yet as best as I can follow it thru the years, quite thorough) hatred of women, especially those in any position of art world power, would certainly explain his recent overly-polite rave review of the current SaMoMu show (Feb. 15 Calendar section). Nary a discussion of the involvement of a commercial gallery placing a chunk of its stable into a non-profit institutional space.

In the world of Christopher Knight, commerce by a man serves aesthetics, while I guess christopher just cannot trust the motives of a woman. Christopher Knight’s misogyny is getting almost as visible as the bags under his eyes. Too bad they don’t have a nip and tuck to remove whatever it was your mother must have done to you.

Someone told me New York curator Josh Decter was at some art party here in L.A. and was talking shit about Coagula Art Journal, and claiming that it was started in New York - what an uninformed idiot - and a few people took him to task and he reportedly got all academic-voice nervous and expounded “we need to be throwing our support behind things that are actually a threat to the status quo.” When pressed by some of my faithful for exactly what those factions were, he stammered and walked away.

The prick is a member of the status quo but appropriates the language of change and confrontation to lend authenticity to his stale ideas and a veneer of mattering to his persona. Like almost all academics, he was told to color within the lines as a child and it seems to remain his cardinal rule. And what out there is a threat to the status quo? Anything threatening gets offered a teaching gig and is lobotomized by booksmart pinheads like Josh Decter.

And what is Josh Decter doing in L.A.? Apparently curating a show about the mystique of L.A. and using writer James McElroy as the point of departure. People from the East Coast love Raymond Chandler and McElroy as L.A. writers, while people from the west coast seem to gravitate toward Bukowski. And the grad schools out here get a fresh crop of kids from all over who show up and make art about being in L.A. and the mystique here for most of their time in school. Can you imagine a curator from L.A. going to New York and curating a show about the mystique of New York and having artists set up “events” in different parts of the city to reflect the writings of - whose novels take place in New York? Anyway, it would be ludicrous, New Yorkers would be like “WHODAFUCKAREYOUBUD?” And that is my attitude about twits who show up here to tell us how exotic we are. Go back to Hillaryville.

Josh Decter seems as amateur hour as they come. Do a search on google.com for Joshua Decter and ask yourself, has he done anything but suck status quo cock? I saw two pages of medicority but perhaps someone can enlighten me. Funny, I don’t FEEL threatend . . . . . . .

So tonight, I didn’t do a damn thing and I don’t feel guilty. Got an email from an artist who I talked shit about recently. I talk shit for a living - that is what puts the “critic” in “art critic” Is that so hard to understand? Seein, though, that it was at her opening, I guess it was prety classless of me, there are places where you just gotta have some couth, so sorry for calling your shittly little painting a shitty little painting in front of the two friends of yours who bothered to come to the group show you were in - - I hope I am not a “threat” to people, I just want to be liked and invited to the fucking cocktail parties, I can chitchat with the best of them about meaningless trivia.

Went by and saw Joel Bloom - he is a grandpa - and wrote some stuff for Artscene’s 20th anniversary issue. their 20th and my 10th in the same month. I don’t think either of us are having parties or anything. I’m not even going to Vegas now I am so behind in my work. Went over some of it with Salerno and am happy to report subscribers will be getting the new issue soon.

Take this test below - I was quite relieved, all things considered, with the results (of course, you can count how many times I use the word “I” here and guess some of the followng, eh?

Woke up this morning to my answering machine, a neighbor informing me that the police were in the gallery next door to mine. That would be the Eye Five gallery. Apparently some kids were living in there. They aren’t now. I listened to my neighbor’s play by play and rolled over and went back to sleep and when I got up, Eye Five had a new gallery attendant (musician/poet Michael Child) and I wasn’t asking questions.

Went to Martin Durazo’s massive installation at Otis. I am not much for academia, but neither, it seems is Durazo. His show Fresh Air 100 was wry in all the right places and sophisticated in the best spots. He overwhelmed the space with a full-scale installation, but kept it consistent enough that the many subtleties were pleasant when encountered. Whoever at Otis gave approval for this show is immune to the criticism I splay at art educational institutions in an upcoming essay in the March Artscene magazine (the website is artscenecal.com).

Durazo takes detritus, trash, and makes installations out of the more beautiful objects discarded - lots of styrofoam and aquariums. There seems to be a meditation on doing things the second time around, on making the most of second chances, underscored by many condom wrapper modernist grids on the walls, and undergrad students in lab coats running the show - under Master Martin’s direction, of course. A paper shredder waterfall at the entrance signals Durazo’s recycled-lease-on-life concern and it is echoed throughout a gallery that combines the hectic interplay of initial encounters with plenty of elbow room for considering other options. So much garbage-art and junk assemblage passes for commentary (on a conceptual level) and installation (on an aesthetic level). Here a serious theme is subtly rendered with the sexiest, space-age trash one could ever dig out of the dumpster. Martin Durazo has made the best installation I have seen in Los Angeles in as long as I can remember and even though it is February, it could easily be considered a candidate for exhibit of the year.

Made it back to the Brewery for a show at Raid Projects, but it was only a closing party for the Claremont Graduate University student show. Claremont seems to run hot or cold with its student body - short periods of time see a cluster of graduates establish a national reputation, and then a few years of locals-only nobodies (or at least “not yets”).

In the late 80s CGU had Dennis Hollingsworth, Kim Dingle, Jill D’Agnenica and Habib Kheradyar all within a semester or two of each other. Maybe a blip here or there until you get Patrick Wilson, Michelle Fierro and Jason Eoff all in a two-year period in the mid-90s. So in the last two or so years, CGU has produced Chinatown sensation Carlee Fernandez and Ace Gallery standout sculptor Joel Morrison - and this show of the class of ‘01 was a nice party, but the dealers were not exactly populating the droves. Here’s hoping that ‘02 will add a name or two to these recent CGU standouts (this is not a discussion of talent or merit, but of accomplishment and recognition; of forces in the art world validating CGU’s standards).

Wound up at Hop Louie, a bar in Chinatown, where Reggie Lord of Lord Mori gallery and artist Chris Wilder horsed around, curator Max Presneill and artist Matt Driggs stuck to their soccer talk over Budweisers and beautiful bachelorettes Jennifer Faist and Sharon Ben-Tal were rolling their eyes at the endless pickup lines just about every guy in the joint was offering.

Heard that Peter Voulkos died, the Los Angeles Times quoted Ken Price saying that PV was “the most important person in clay in the 20th century.” The subtleties of that medium were always lost on me, the technical virtuosity overwhelms. Someone like Robert Arneson may not be as “historically important” but is probably going to be remembered longer by virtue of the accessibility of the subject matter. Sorry kiddos, I know the art schools aren’t teaching this, but it is what ends up getting fixed in the mix.

Which David Lynch character are you most like?

Saw DeKooning on DeKooning, a documentary, tonight at MOCA. Didn’t even see the drawing show of his that is up, will go back though. So basically, they bring a camera crew to his studio and the dude won’t even run a comb through his hair. He looked so slovenly - like a clean-shaven homeless person. He was inarticulate, a real “grunt” artist. It took him 25 years to get his first solo show and he couldn’t even remember where or when it had taken place - and this was filmed many, many years before the alzheimers, too. He managed a few insights, though. The best was, the interviewer is running down a list of artists, Picasso, Braque, and he is responding, giving his opinion. When they get to Matisse, DeKooning says “With him, there was no ISM. There was just painting.” He articulated his approval of this, and his need to remind himself of this all the time - of avoiding “ism”s, of not producing an art that just illustrated aesthetic or theoretical concepts or towed any line. Other trivia: he sold his first painting for $50, Meyer Schapiro found a DeKooning thrown in the hall, bound for the trash. It was the Woman I that now hangs in the Museum of Modern Art.

Basically, his wife did all the talking, he did all the painting when he wasn’t doing all the mumbling or all the smoking. There were cool pictures of Franz Kline. A real bloated guy. The smoking was pretty awesome - just to watch something that makes people today borderline hysterical. Okay, over the borderline, as Madonna would say.

The film showed a lot of DeKooning paintings. They looked fresh, but I have to wonder if he didn’t have a million imitators that flooded every gallery back then that so saturated things that it only looks good now in hindsight, after a long abstinence. There had to be a time when people were just sick of looking at the gooey slashes and manic brushstrokes. And it is pretty easily imitated, so how to tell a good DeKooning imitator from a bad one let alone a good one of his own works from a lousy or unfinished piece?

There was a long part at the end of the movie where he paints about 2/3 of a painting. I fell asleep. I don’t know how long I was asleep, but I dreamt and everything. The MOCA theater has comfortable seats. All of a sudden, his painting was done and the movie was over. I went to Traxx for a desert and coffee and the late artist Mike Kanamitsu’s son was my waiter. “Did your dad hang out with DeKooning?” “Mmm, yeah.” Weird.

New issue was distributed throughout Silverlake/Los Feliz/Echo Park today. Dez Festiva’s brakes were out of whack, but got fixed. Boxes should arrive in New York tomorrow.

The show at my gallery right now has some video pieces, so for the first time in years, I have a television in my place - and a VCR. So I watched Art City; Simplicity tonight. It is a movie on video/ dvd featuring all sorts of art stars - Dave Hickey, Agnes Martin, Amy Adler, John Baldessari, Robert Williams, oh, and ME ! I was pretty, uh, amped when they filmed me - it was two years ago - my role in the movie is to play a bit of a foil. Heh heh heh. It is an hour long documenary and pretty good. You can order it at 1-888-ART-CITY.

Okay, so a Julian Schnabel show is scheduled for Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills sometime in Spring. Rumor that i heard is that Schnabel found a painting of a woman in a Bumfuq, Texas thrift store somewhere and has repainted it numerous times in a variety of sizes, with each painting featuring a unique way of painting a slash across the eyes.

Schnabel reportedly loves L.A. (if you are a groupie, he is registered at the Chateau Marmont under the name of his Milo-character from the Basquiat film) and is rumored to have pimped his daughter to John Frusciante of the Red Hot Chili Peppers (Does Julian Schnabel want to be a rockstar too?). Maybe Julian should ask River Phoenix’s parents what happened a few weeks after their son started hanging out with John Frusciante. Hopefully Schnobby’s junior hottie will survive her brush with the (ha) allegedly sober Fruitshanty.

Which Firearm are you? brought to you byStan Ryker

So as far as everyone getting copies of the new issue of Coagula, today I got more of the shipping done, but not all of it. Have to go back, everyone will get their boxes though. Have added some new people, have three more slots if anyone wants one.

…and it was tails - one of those “State” quarters - New York in fact, so it landed showing New York, so therefore, i am not going to New York. Time to empty out a casino via the craps table and pay the guy who prints the magazine, and maybe even pay my rent !

Up late, even though I have shipping of Coagula boxes nationwide to do tomorrow!

There was a big auction of contemporary art in London last week and 1 in 4 lots failed to sell - chiefly artworks by Brit twits ! Sara Lucas, Chris Ofili, Gavin Turk and Rachel Whiteread all tanked goose-egg and without Charles Saatchi, Damien Hirst has almost no clothes - with one spin painting selling for the minimum and a stupid “sculpture” of pharmaceuticals in a medicine cabinet going back to the pharmacy (Warhol had “The Factory,” Hirst has a pharmacy).

and proof these tests are all accurate - i took this test WEEKS after making this page this color:

Red: 10/100 Blue: 9/100 White: 7/100 Yellow: 19/100

Take the Color Code Test
by Dano