Okay, that was not the final post of the year. I just read this horseshit from the UK Guardian via the ArtForum website:

12.31.03 Orange, the British communications corporation, recently commissioned artist Peter Kennard to create an image that could be projected onto the facade of London’s Trinity House as part of the city’s Brighten Up London campaign. But at the last minute the company decided not to project Kennard’s depiction of the Virgin Mary with a peace-sign halo, saying that the work was “too harsh.” In the UK, the incident has opened up a debate about the corporate sponsorship of art, prompting Kennard to write in The Guardian: “[Corporate sponsors] give the impression of supporting dissident views and freedom of expression, but if there is any danger that your sponsored work encourages even a modicum of critical debate, you’re out the door.”

This is all accurate, except the subtle indication that coporate sponsors are unique in this. All patrons exert pressure on the artists they fund to make palatable art as they see it, and PUBLIC entities are the most censorious in this regard.

Do it yourself or shut the fuck up and eat what they tell you.

This is my final post of 2003. It was an okay year. I was just on the roof of the Brewery watching the final sunset of the year. It was beautiful, from orange to glowing magenta. then the cool grey of the evening seeped in and I got a chill. Tonight I am going to a party with food and friends.

I will probably remember 2003 as the year I saw the Philip Guston retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Okay, now it is time to look forward… Happy New Year.

I drove my girlfriend down to Newport Beach to by a used truck. Then, ironically, Pixie and George Herms came by my loft with VIP tickets to the Los Angeles Car Show opening night preview. The GF was fed up with cars and Salerno is resting up for tomorrow night, so I asked my neighbor Chris Hammond and he was up for it. We drove down to the staples Center parking lot, mingled with the L.A. Kings fans on their way to the game and made it to the show.

Cars are boring, especially when they are not customized. We got to go to a VIP section and have free drinks and food. The catered food was okay, filling at least, and I had a diet coke. Wowee - Kazowee. The cars that did not look all alike only stuck out by being uglier than the others. What the fuck is a power train? Anyway, yeah, I’d drive a scuzola shitkicker if I hit the fiscal jakpot, get some wheels my lady would feel like a queen ridin’ in, but this slice of Generica was not my scene. But it was great to get out of the house and go do something, anything, especially for free!

So that is what the Brewery is like, George Herms comes by your door and his wife Pixie is working on her website and cannot go to a shindig you wouldn’t pay a buck to walk into and you get tickets and take Andy Warhol’s handyman and he tells you stories about getting lessons on how to pick out good suits from Fred Hughes (Andy’s manager) back in the ’60s and he pays for parking. When the place is polluted or dusty or loud or too cold, i remind myself of the good side of my little art colony neighborhood.

From today’s New York Post:

PATRICK McMullan’s buzzed-about new book of celebrity photography, So80s, is being savaged by Webster Hall curator Baird Jones. In a review in art magazine Coagula, Jones - who neglects to mention that he occasionally publishes party pics of his own - hisses about McMullan’s “monstrous ineptitude.” Jones goes on to say that McMullan’s highly respected photos are marred by “minimal contrast, definition and range.” The seething scenester concludes, “better shots could be salvaged from a 10th-grade shooting expedition in Washington Square Park.”

Officially done with the frickin’ holidays, finished the final get-together with my family, back home, trying to find out which galleries are open next week. Went to the Cathedral in Downtown L.A. on Friday. It was a corporate nothing on the outside but marvelous on the inside.

The space and light of the architecture of the Cathedral are quite dramatic and very idiosyncratic to Southern California - the emphasis is on mixing Spanish colonial with Modern and it works - especially if you like amber and beige light-tones. this ain’t no Euro-gothic knockoff Cathedral, this is Cali-Fucking-Fornia.

Meanwhile the art is thin, with the exception of the John Nava tapestries on the walls of the church - these are fabulous renderings of historic saints all lined up in profile looking up toward the altar. The diversity of Saints along with the rockstar power they carry - Look, it’s Saint Patrick! - is very L.A, and Nava’s meticulous realism translates on a massive scale flawlessly.

The Haloed Queen of the Angels above the entrance is made to appear as a ponytailed teenaged Native American, so that was risky and it works. The Robert Graham bronze doors are ridiculously garbled and sloppy. Dull. There is tons of craftsmanship that goes into the marble, alabaster and carpentered wood throughout the place, and there is a spectacle and dazzle factor going on, but that is all to be expected (this is a cathedral, not just a church). The art - when it does appear - is lifeless, sanitized, and hardly fits. I discovered, unexpectedly, that there are catacombs underneath where you can be buried - the recently departed Gregory Peck is already there, as are the disintered remains of many Cardinals and Bishops from L.A.’s past. I went with my brother who had already toured the place.

There was a side altar to the victims of the church’s sexual abuse - although the sign on the side wall was just a taped-up piece of paper, it still was some gesture on their part, and relatively prominent. Just remember that I have been railing against art school faculty (read: fifty year old loser college professors) who have been banging and heartbreaking their students (read: twenty year old art tart hootchies and assorted hotties) when it finally breaks as a newfound scandal. Maybe some kid will pull a gun and slay a whole faculty to get her point across at the psychological and emotional abuse that she suffered at the hands (or dick) of her painting instructor… Hope i am not the guest lecturer on campus that afternoon…

Woke up way early, drove my GF to the train station. She will be back tomorrow.Went to the Pantry for breakfast. Had the most delicious steak and eeggs of my entire life. It was sublime.

After that I took a nap, watched my Rolling Stones DVD, went to La Mirada to spend Christmas with one of my brothers and his in-laws, then came back to downtown to Jim Fittipaldi’s Orphan Christmas Party where artists Deborah Ascheim and Max Presneill were already through with their food but still inseparable. Salerno was around as was Farid Beshid, Jett Jackson and a smattering of regulars. By 1 a.m. there was Gypsy music playing and people dancing. I bet the dancers are still going at it at the moment of this writing, and seeing as they are all art life models, have probably disrobed, but i was wiped out.

Merry Christmas.

We opened presents. I got a 4-DVD box set of the Rolling Stones most recent World Tour, the complete 6-DVD box set of Gumby episodes and the film Crumb. My girlfriend knows what I like. She was bummed because her grand prize present for me was a customized baseball jersey that she ordered on the internet and it has not arrived. Her sister sent down a wrapped present for me which turned out to be the DVD for Purple Rain.

I got her a cordless phone which is charging right now, a humidifier (we both have tweaked lungs and she commented that it would be good for her skin) a shiatsu massager and some business cards promoting her website, which she did not know she had until she looked at the card tonight.

See, I have spent the past month building my girlfriend a website (she is an artist), assisted by my friend at this company. How badly I wanted to bitch about scanning slides and cropping photos in my live journal over the past few weeks but the GF reads the journal here on occasion. Had to be quiet about what i was up to. And I did not blow it and she was stunned and happy.

This article about contemporary art is ridiculous. Collector Kent Logan is some kind of juvenile intellectual alright - calling today’s art New Surrealism is like calling shopping in a mall The New Money. Proof again that the people who buy most contemporary art are as far from intellectual as physics can account for.

Here is a Yahoo Link if that one gets broken. The center of the art world has shifted from London to Belin. Not that i am a rank capitalist named Kent asshole Logan buying schnitzel for my wife Vickie and speculating on cheap euro crap. What trash… Let’s be edgy - George Condo is going to be a major artist - hey Mister FuckLogan, he already is. Twit. Say hi for Coagula to Kobe Bryant next time he visits your wife in Vail Colorado…

and now for somthing completely different… I took a personality quiz to see which Muppet I was. At first I got Kermit the Frog, but then I changed some answers around.

You are Gonzo the Great.
You love everyone, and still you get shot out of a
cannon on a regular basis. Oh, and you are
completely insane and have a strange
fascination for chickens.

ALSO KNOWN AS:
The Great Gonzo, Gonzo the Great, Just Plain Weird
SPECIES:
Whatever

HOBBIES:
Tapdancing blindfolded on tapioca while balancing a
piano on his nose, backwards, five times fast.

FAVORITE MOVIE:
“From Here to Eternity…with no brakes.”

FAVORITE TV SHOW:
“Touched By An Anvil”

QUOTE:
“No parachute? Wow! This is so cool!”

What Muppet are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

The restaurant here at the Brewery Art Colony is closing until January 5. It will be back to the Cambodian coffee shop and IHOP for me. I figured out how much I spend dining out and it is fucking ridiculous. But I never cooked and am so irresponsible when it comes to cleaning up a mess, so i just take pains and expenses to not make the mess in the first place (in the kitchen as well as in relationships). I absolutely hate to have food around with little crumbs that atract bugs. i need my place to be bug free, I will take uninsulated hot or cold but not with bugs, no way, and pets and food attract bugs, ergo, neither here!

So I had the sirloin cheeseburger and my girlfriend had a Portobello mushroom and we will be abck in the New Year. Until then, it will be a battle of the appetite and the automobile.