L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Bing Crosby died a month before Merrie Olde Christmas aired on national television. The holiday special included one of the most unexpected and fortuitous duets of the crooner’s career: a pairing with David Bowie, then fresh off of Station to Station. Bowie and Bing, over forty years apart in age, performed a[…..]
Today’s article is brought to you from our friends at the Huffington Post, written by James Scarborough. Literature supplies the concept of an unreliable narrator, whose credibility one questions or otherwise doubts in the telling of a particular story. The Orange County Museum of Art‘s 2010 California Biennial, curated by Sarah C. Bancroft, suggests that the concept can be applied to art museums as well:[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Pierre Restany, the critic who co-coined the term Nouveau Réalisme, was supposed to be there for Yves Klein’s first Leap into the Void. Weeks earlier, Klein had told Restany “he was going to do something very ‘important.’” He was “going to give a practical demonstration of levitation,” and he wanted Restany to[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley The first time I visited downtown Los Angeles, I was surprised by its bareness. A friend and I, both of us art students, had driven in from Claremont for an opening, tackling the congested Santa Monica freeway for the first time, too. A fellow student and L.A. veteran had warned us that,[…..]
From the DS Archives reacquaints you with the work of Korin Fought who has been building on the same motifs that were featured here in 2008. Fought continues to explore the sweet and provocative and unusual and unexpected moments in which people come together and it’s clear that the work has done quite a bit of growing up. She most recently exhibited at the Corey[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Back when L.A. art was in its adolescence, critic Peter Plagens asked painter John Altoon why being an artist couldn’t just be about making work: I used to say, “John, what about the artist who just goes into his studio, paints paintings and tries to make them the best that he can?[…..]
L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley On November 2nd, 72 year-old Jerry Brown, a walking archive of California radicalism, gave his gubernatorial acceptance speech from the stage of Oakland’s Fox Theater. “Now look,” he said, with let-me-level-with-you straightness, “I like the symbolism of this theater because it was dark and . . . there were people camped in[…..]
