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"I want to leave home less and less."
•As the sixth week of the stay-at-home order in California begins, I realize that I"ve become deranged and must be suffering from a Coronavirus pandemic-induced Stockholm syndrome because I keep thinking: I don"t want the quarantine to end.Outside my home's bubble is tragedy: Thousands upon tens of thousands of lives… -
No, I haven"t read all of Proust. Fighting the coronavirus humble brag
•David Hockney has painted 10 new iPad works. Barbra Streisand is working on her memoir. On Instragram people are baking bread and working out. Friends are calling to say that they"ve Marie-Kondo"d their homes.And all their getting-things-done is stressing me out.What this is is an epidemic of humble brags.People are… -
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… -
Israel's Holden Caulfield: On Yair Assulin's "The Drive"
•YAIR ASSULIN"S The Drive, an award-winning Israeli novel first published in Hebrew in 2011, has just been released in the United States by New Vessel Press, in a translation by Jessica Cohen. It is a slim book that speaks volumes about the current state of Israel.The Drive represents a new… -
Grammys 2021 Get Fresh
•This week's Grammy Awards Ceremony, the second during the pandemic, made the best of a bad situation bringing a much needed freshness to the awards show.In recent times, the Grammys show have found a successful formula and run it into the ground. The show had pared down the more than… -
Reviewing 2020: My Top Ten Books Of 2020
•In the beginning of the pandemic I was scattered and couldn"t really concentrate on any sustained reading. However, as the year went on and I reached saturation in my viewing capacity, I turned to books, aided by the discovery that I could easily borrow books online from the Public library,… -
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… -
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… -
Herb Alpert Awards Double Down During Pandemic: Ten Award Winners Announced In Online Event
•The Artist is often imagined as a solitary figure creating works of the imagination that stand on their own when shared with a public that they remain separate from.That is a fiction. The last year of isolation has made me keenly aware of how much Art in all its forms… -
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.… -
An Evening Of Qatari Culture Under The Stars At The "Desert Drive-In"
•Picture this: A evening under the stars, sitting on couches and deck chairs in a large open field, with ottomans on which a Middle Eastern feast was set, to watch a series of short films on a giant outdoor screen. Dubbed a "Desert Drive-In" the evening was organized by the… -
Bernard-Henri Lévy: The Will to See, The Ability to Act, The Drive to Inspire
•Bernard-Henri Lévy has a new book, The Will to See: Dispatches from a World of Misery and Hope (Yale University Press) and a documentary of the same name, both of which combine autobiography with documentary journalism and humanitarian activism. In many ways, it is a summation of Lévy's efforts over…