In his 2011 video, “Liberaceón,” Chris E. Vargas inserts radical, queer rhetoric into the arguably apolitical, high zest that was Wladziu Valentino Liberace’s life. HBO’s biopic about Liberace is headed to Cannes this month. Jacqueline Clay’s article was originally published September 5, 2011. History, like most things, is subjective. What is culled from individual accounts is accepted as fact and eventually translates into some kind[…..]
#Hashtags provides a platform for longer reconsiderations of artworks and art practices outside of the review format and in new contexts. In the prelude to his book The Triumph of Anti-Art, Thomas McEvilley held up the Greek philosopher Diogenes of Sinope, founder of the School of Cynics, as a prototypical conceptual and performance artist who strove to break down the barriers separating philosophy and life.[…..]
In contemporary U.S. culture, abstract art is difficult for many to grasp because it so completely defeats the imposition of language on art that cultural meaning falls away. If abstract art asserts meaning at all, it does so elliptically, circling around, not toward, the identifiable expression of objects, events, people, experiences, emotions, or ideas that representational art depicts. In a sense, then, abstract art is[…..]
Julio César Morales is an artist, curator, and educator who recently left the San Francisco Bay Area to become curator at the Arizona State University Art Museum in Tempe. Morales was an adjunct curator at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from 2008-12, where he created “PAUSE: Practice and Exchange,” a series of solo exhibitions by artists including Allan de Souza, Euan Macdonald, and[…..]
Arts organizations in 2013 strive for more than visitors and ticket buyers. Take a look at just about any arts nonprofit’s mission statement and you’re likely to see community building, engagement, and education listed as top priorities. Public lectures and digital content production top the list of methods, but every once and a while an organization tries something more unique; here in Los Angeles, for[…..]
There are so many things to look at in a museum–but that doesn’t mean that art doesn’t exist in unplanned and accidental encounters. Today #Hashtags reprints one of our favorite essays from last year, on the topic of uncurated looking. It was miraculous to me, only because I had never seen the space behind the doors. Yet, it was shameful, as if I had seen[…..]
Watching “Five Broken Cameras” and “How to Survive a Plague”—two outstanding documentaries nominated for yesterday’s Academy Awards—it’s easy to be reminded of what a gift this kind of attention can be for the community or person being featured. Yet watching Emad Burnat’s young son Gibreel stand center stage with his own camera, filming the Docuday audience during Saturday’s question-and-answer session, it’s also hard to shake[…..]
