I get it, how it must have seemed to that hippie in 1986 who said it was so different now then it was then and now it is so much later but it maybe hasn’t changed as much. That empty brick storefront on Commonwealth was the first place I ever tried sushi. It was 1986 …
Everyone is at Coachella seeing the reunited version of The Replacements. Everybody but me. But I am here listening to everything they ever did and you know how nostalgia is the sweetest poison, right, don’t you? I never saw them live and didn’t own any of their albums until well into the 1990s but there …
Unlike every art pundit phoning in an internet review of George Bush’s painting exhibition in Dallas, I actually flew down to the Big D last week to see them for myself. The exhibition is at his presidential library on the SMU campus. I had lunch at Cafe 43 there to start my visit and then …
So there was that 5.1 quake on Friday and maybe that had something to do with the whole Weird Saturday or maybe not but here goes… I get to the gallery five minutes before Noon and my two interns are there waiting (90% of success is showing up) and I go to unlock the door …
For three decades, John Miner has established himself as a screen-printing legend in Los Angeles. He has worked with the biggest and the best. A short list is easy to remember, when you are in the league of John Miner to name one art star you would have to name them all, suffice to say …
Thirty years in the art world and I had never been to a Whitney Biennial. That was actually something worth bragging about and especially after having been to one I can unabashedly lament that I will never be able to say it again. The Whitney Biennial carries immense weight in the art world. There is …
It suddenly dawned on me, in February of 2014, that it had been in mid-February of 1995 that Bloom’s General Store opened. It had actually opened a few weeks prior, along with Coffee Strippers and they blocked off the streets, put up a music stage and threw a grand opening party. So I posted a …
Diebenkorn “Berkley Years” at the Palm Springs Museum – amazing paintings. For a guy with such wicked shifts in subject the museum sure blended it all – maybe a little too fluid. Would have preferred more chronology in placement. He had three distinct phases in the years 1953-67: •He starts out, age 31, an abstract …
Craig Stephens was a freelance writer emigré from Australia who looked like he might have been the byproduct of a good-looking groupie and Paul McCartney – and that was the first thing I said to him when I met him at Barbara’s Bar at the Brewery in 99 or 2000 or ….well like everything whirling …
If you aspire to be a successful, exhibiting artist in Los Angeles, perhaps it is time to get serious about that goal. It is time for you to understand the CULTURE of the Art World Itself. Start 2014 off right as the new year offers You ART WORLD BOOTCAMP… You are ready to: * Immerse …
The biggest problem with much art these days is that it is either form or thought or identity. Most of the product that would fall in any of these camps is indulged with a lot of rhetoric. This baggage is basically just excuse-making. There is an excuse as to why the art is so shitty …
Lou Reed – Don’t Settle For Walking I was really into Lou Reed. In 1981 you couldn’t just download everything he had ever recorded. I would see him and the Velvet Underground referred to in punk zine interviews with bands when they would talk about their influences. This was exactly how I discovered Charles Bukowski …