Rochelle Botello’s recent work continues her quest to be an uncompromising formalist who takes the stuffiness and rigidity out of the “art for art’s sake” approach. Her superpower is a talent to render whimsy and make it no less serious than any other grand philosophical foray into the meaning of things. Refreshingly free of theoretical … Read more

Over the last decades, value shifted from art to artist. We still travel to see singular works of art: da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, Caravaggio’s Medusa, Klimt’s The Kiss, Picasso’s Guernica, The Rothko Chapel, The Lightening Field by Walter De Maria. Yet it is no longer enough for an artwork to be authentic. The audience wants to see beyond the art, to know … Read more

I’ve seen hundreds of museum shows around the world. This exhibit is the worst. Its only standout feature is that it is clearly the worst, that no other show comes to mind to even compete with it.

Two giants of art, two great Modernists, Richard Serra and Frank Stella passed within a few weeks of each other in the Spring of 2024. There were many parallels in their careers but in this most hectic, political year, these passings give pause. Can art, considering the current climate, ever be apolitical again? Triumphantly apolitical? … Read more

The press release for Songs in the Key of Mard – the solo show of Nathaniel Mellors at The Box in Downtown L.A.’s Arts District – was a musical track, accessible through a QR code. Nathaniel Mellors plays with the words “press release,” repurposing the term into a call to action. The creative license taken … Read more

Some artists leave without a trace. Some artists meticulously trace their source material. Some cultures vanish without a trace. Some people trace their past to preserve it. Perhaps they trace the path they made last night to find something they lost or maybe they trace their roots or look back for a trace of some … Read more

Julia Rooney takes lyrical modernist painting into the 21st century with a meditation on pictorial depth in her BLUEPRINT solo show at Band of Vices.

It is a quirk, really, that oil on canvas is the gold standard of where the billionaires park their money to beat inflation. Paintings have a proven track record of lasting centuries when they are just left alone on a wall or in an attic. But the elemental truths that great paintings tell are not … Read more

The artist Robert Irwin, a colossal figure in reductive Modernism, died today at the age of 95.  His list of accomplishments is almost as long as the demonstrable influence he had on how art itself is fabricated, displayed and revered. Here is one second-hand story of the man and a first-hand anecdote of my own. … Read more

A five-person panel at the los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art discussed the bygone days of the 1960s, 70s and 80s in the L.A. art scene.