Est. 1992
Mat Gleason One of the more frustrating fabulists to ever cross my path, Brady Westwater (born Ross Shockley) has died, reportedly after a lingering illness. He helped me out a few times in the 1990s, bought advertisements for friends in Coagula Art Journal as a way of lending me money and being “the good guy” in his … Read more
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE RENOWNED ART COLLECTIVE CALIFORNIA LOCOS RELEASE BOOK RENAISSANCE AND REBELLION BY DRAGO PUBLISHER IN ROME The CALIFORNIA LOCOS, five Los Angeles artists whose work epitomizes West Coast culture, announce their final art events in L.A. for the foreseeable future ahead of a European tour that will take their exhibition schedule beyond the … Read more
There was an Anselm Keifer solo show entitled EXODUS at Gagosian Gallery on Wilshire in Los Angeles. The expansive space was once a private museum owned by two sleezy union-busting pieces of trash but is now this commercial gallery. As overwhelmed by the spectacle of fabrication as one might get, my attempts to write about … Read more
We went by Randi’s studio in downtown LA. Right in the heart of it. Seventh and Main, where U2 played on the roof in 1987. She had been working in her garage across town for a few years and the work she made there, painting and drawing, was on small and medium surfaces – but … Read more
Perhaps we all come to this… On one side we have a difficult truth: ART’s inadequacy of manifesting what was without stoking the sentimental and nostalgic. On the other is a longing, or perhaps expectation, that ART can unleash a profundity beyond language from its storehouse of images, something so great, so vast and often … Read more
When asked, I tell people, mostly visitors to LA, that the Norton Simon Museum has by far the best collection in Southern California if not the West Coast. But I now must qualify this. If you just want to see twentieth century art, there is nothing that rivals the Frederick R. Weisman Foundation. Located in … Read more
Truth be told, Charlie Finch was an obscenely cruel man, psychopathic with his verbal abuse and gratified most when humiliating people. But nobody that I know of benefitted from their relationship with Charlie more than I. Charlie was introduced to me by a mutual friend in the summer of 1992 and he wrote for the … Read more
There is something beyond language in the feeling one gets when a childhood encounter with art is repeated later in life. It is a combination of familiarity and time travel, the reincarnation of what was loosening the grip of the continuum that brought us to our present; loosened if only for a moment. It isn’t … Read more
New York painter Walter Robinson has been exhibiting since the early 1980s. There is a whole mythology of the East Village Scene™ among New York Baby Boomers that took place in the late seventies and early eighties. While it did give us Haring, Scharff and most importantly Basquiat, the proof it was little more than … Read more
Pablo Picasso, Creator/Destroyer as the title of one of his many biographies observed. Pablo Picasso, selfish prick or genius… or both? If any artist of the twentieth century “contained multitudes” in the way Walt Whitman observed about actualizing the many lenses of human potential, it was Picasso. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has … Read more