L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley “Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like putting a live grenade in the hands of a child,” Norman Mailer infamously remarked in 1971, less than one year before Arbus died and over nine years after she snapped a photo of a scrawny blond boy who actually did have grenade in hand.[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Most good artists moonlight as social historians at least some of the time. Often, they’re as bad at it as real-deal historians are (just think what sort of voluptuously erroneous textbook Gauguin would’ve written on the Polynesians, or what might have happened if Damien Hirst gem-encrusted skull had launched a scholarly inquest[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Sunday night, before we knew for certain Osama bin Laden had died, I was listening to the radio and reading an essay by Kamin Mohammadi. Called Lust, Devotion & the Binary Code (titles that rely on the power of threes—consider “Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire” or “Sex, Art, and Americn[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Human Nature is the remarkably, almost assaultingly, immense title of Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s current exhibition of art from its contemporary collection. But a walk through the galleries will quickly show you that immensity is actually far from the point. Unlike past exhibitions with similar sounding names—The Family of Man,[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley A river of blood runs through the history of womankind,” wrote cultural critic Caitlin Flanagan, with so much dramatic sway that the truthfulness almost got lost in the motion. “That river stops, more or less, with the installation of [a] shag carpet.” The carpet in question—lush, blue and all the rage in[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley When Richard Strauss’ indulgent opera Ariadne Auf Naxos had its U.S. premiere at the Met in 1962, critic Everett Helm was more than underwhelmed; he was exasperated. The whole show, he wrote, “makes dupes of the audience, being all form but having no real content.” It was “theatrically flabby,” “silly and contrived.”[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley It makes a weird kind of sense that Elizabeth Taylor, who managed to move from sweetheart to sexpot to scandal then back to sweetheart more gracefully than any actress on record, would die the week of Tennessee Williams’ centennial. The playwright, not unlike the actress, had a remarkable knack for being glamorous[…..]
