• Inside The Newly Renovated Museum Of Modern Art

    In the waning hours before coronavirus shut down New York, I visited a more-empty-than-usual Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Christina's World By Andrew Wyeth 1948 MUSEUM OF MODERN ART. COURTESY OF MOMA The Museum re-opened last October after several months of closure for expansion, renovation, and re-installation of the collection. Let me cut to the chase here: I love what the Museum has done MoMA has found a way to return to the spirit of early curators Alfred Barr and William…

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  • Traces Of Ai Weiwei's Politics At Skirball Cultural Center.

    "Ai Weiwei: Trace" at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles presents three of the six floor panels Ai Weiwei created in 2014 for a site-specific exhibition in San Francisco on Alcatraz Island concerning prisoners of conscience, political prisoners, and those subject to unlawful detention and, in some cases, torture. The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gardens in Washington D.C. subsequently acquired the panels and then, in turn, made the exhibition available to the Skirball. The exhibiti... View Original Article

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  • A Pleasing Pandemic In Normandy: David Hockney's Creative French Country Prints

    LA Louver gallery in Venice, California which is celebrating its 45th year, has a new exhibition that you can actually go see by appointment, "David Hockney: My Normandy." I could say that seeing an exhibition of art in person, and seeing the joy with which Hockney in his 80s creates his work, was for me a shot in the arm – or, perhaps more accurately, that two shots in the arm makes it a delight to see the exhibition.In March…

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  • Tobi Kahn's Visual Seder

    "To think visually is a capacity not just for artists; it is essential for everyone." With these words the visual artist Tobi Kahn concludes the artist statement that accompanies the just published "Mishkan Haseder," a new Passover Haggadah published by the Central Conference of Rabbis (CCR).This new edition comes replete with new translations, new Rabbinical commentaries, all enhanced by an awe-compelling selection of poems by Yehuda Amichai, Maxine Kumin, Muriel Rukeyser, Adrienne Rich, Ma... View Original Article

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  • Los Angeles' Annenberg Space For Photography To Close Permanently

    Wallis Annenberg announced this week that the Annenberg Space for Photography which has been closed since March due to the pandemic, will not reopen. Located in Century City, the decade old institution had been LA's only museum devoted solely to Photography.In a letter posted on the The Annenberg Space's website, Annenberg said her decisions was "borne out of the pandemic that has upended public institutions across the world." Calling it a "joy and a privilege to share my favorite art…

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  • Studio DRIFT's Freedom Franchise And Drone Art

    Art has always had as its schema to make us see. At different times, in different ways, it has called on us to rethink every aspect of perception - what we see, how we see it, how it is seen and how it is rendered; as well as to reconsider the very materials with which art can be made, of paint and how it's applied; of the properties of and our relation to color, metal, marble, wood; of objects in…

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  • Art Experiences At Home: Russian Edition

    In the period A.C. (After Covid), I needed, more than ever, to look at Art. And given that I didn"t see traveling in the foreseeable future, I started to think: Where have I always wanted to go? What Museum have I always wanted to visit? What first came to mind: The Hermitage in St. Petersburg.Turns out The Hermitage has a fairly robust series of video tours, as well as a way to virtually visit the Museum.What I expected was a…

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  • Donald Judd Breakthrough Art

    Judd, the Donald Judd retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art was among the shows I caught B.C. (before Coronavirus), and although you can see it now online, it doesn"t do it justice.Donald Judd's who died in 1994, studied philosophy in college, and did graduate work in Columbia in art history. He spent many years as an art critic before arriving at the works he is best known, beginning in the early 1960s.The abstract expressionist painting of the 1940s…

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  • Looking At Contemporary Art

    In the weeks before coronavirus shut down the world’s Art Museums, I saw a staggering amount of Contemporary Art both in Los Angeles which held its contemporary Artmegaddon – Frieze LA-Felix-Art Los Angeles Contemporary (all in one weekend!) and I also visited a number of contemporary art collections in South Florida, including the Perez Art Musem in Miami, the Rubell Museum, the DeLaCruz and Margulies collections in Miami and the Beth Rudin DeWoody collection, The Bunker ArtSpace, in West Palm…

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  • Making the Unseen Known

    The Getty Museum is well regarded for their collection of antiquities housed at the Getty Villa in Malibu, for the work of the Getty Research Institute and the Getty Conservation Institute, as well as for their support of far-flung restorations, and their support and leadership in organizing such landmark art initiatives as the epic "Pacific Standard" exhibitions as well as the Getty's own excellent exhibitions, particularly in recent years as their range and ambition has expanded.Despite al... View Original Article

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  • The Gift of a Great Photo

    With the holidays imminent, whether due to the spirit of the season or the constant barrage of advertising and emails, one's thoughts turn to gift-giving – for others and, even, for oneself.Many gifts are easily consumable or disposable or subject to the whims of trends or fashions. However, there is one gift that in my experience continues to give pleasure, and that is the gift of a great image – a photograph that is a work of art, that imparts…

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  • Pieces of R. B. Kitaj

    It is hard to believe that twelve years have passed since the death of R. B. Kitaj, the at-times-controversial artist who coined the term "The London School" about his fellow contemporary artists in Britain (including Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach) and who spent his last years living in Los Angeles. A new exhibition at LA Louver gallery in Venice, CA, "R.B. Kitaj: Collages and Prints, 1964-1975" reminds us of Kitaj's great talent and his restless, obsessive intelligence expressed in works…

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