A Salty River Phoenix doesn’t care about art. That’s the way I felt growing up there, and that’s the vibe I took with me when I left for Albuquerque in 2001. Even then, the city had more money than God but seemed to spend most of it on sprinkler systems and freeway plants. Art rarely happened, and when it did, it was usually along a hyper-palatable stretch of Scottsdale’s Marshall More …
The Denver Post reported that so much tax money has been raised from the legalization of marijuana in Colorado that the state may soon find itself in the position of refunding taxes to the taxpayers. With $14 million in recreational marijuana sales and more than $2 million in rec taxes just in January that has launched a whole new industry which is making a whole bunch of people very happy, More …
Houston, Texas – long the epicenter of the U.S. oil industry, and expanding rapidly with a 385-acre, 14-building new campus for ExxonMobil in the Woodlands – should provide a cross-cultural audience for the Fotofest 2014 Biennial. Fotofest’s principal exhibit this year, “View From Inside: Contemporary Arab Video, Photography and Mixed Media Art” presents artists from 14 countries in the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia, collectively known by the geo-political acronym MENASA. The More …
Cultural extinctions, small and large, persist and seem intractable. Most public lately is the destruction of the Ai Weiwei vase at Pérez Art Museum Miami by a previously unknown visual artist, Maximo Caminero, who said he was protesting the lack of inclusion of local artists at that museum. Ai’s vase (either the same or very similar to works included last year in More Real? Art in the Age of Truthiness) More …
If ever a character needed the Coen brothers, it is Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac), a folk singer with a passable soulfulness, scrounging in 1961 at the Gaslight Café for his next good meal while Bob Dylan foretold haunts the club amid swirls of cigarette smoke. With his Welshman’s ancestral good looks, black beard, black eyes, and bohemian self-effacement, Davis doesn’t disappoint our first minutes of innocence – there is promise. More …
The truism about Sundance is that it has grown — in all sorts of directions. During the festival, sitting in endless traffic jams, you wish that Park City had grown as gracefully, instead of simply cashing in on an annual infusion of big spenders who have nowhere else to go. That said, bear in mind that Sundance is a filter as well as a spotlight and a megaphone for lots More …
Organized by the British Museum in 2012, and seen previously at Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid and the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, Renaissance to Goya: Prints and Drawings from Spain debuted on December 15 at the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, the show’s only US venue (through March 9). In the exhibition catalog, Mark P. McDonald, the British Museum’s curator of Old More …
If media coverage at the end of a year can seem like a redux of sameness — big money, big deals — consider in arts media the equity gap between the few stories that seem to get told hundreds or thousands of times, versus the thousands of stories that don’t get told a single time. (An inner voice says, “Don’t now try to argue for fairness.” Ok.) Here, though, is More …
I have been a very strong believer in the legalization of marijuana for a few decades now. Back in my college days my friends and I would go to legalization rallies in Milwaukee to support the cause that was spearheaded by NORML (National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws). It was always the same drill. The organizers would always say that smoking pot at the rally was completely verboten More …
Nearly 50 years of James Turrell’s holograms and geometries of light comprise the restless and revelatory retrospective at LACMA now through April 6, 2014. The comprehensive L.A. exhibition follows on the artist’s return to east-coast prominence at New York’s Guggenheim this summer after a 33-year gap. In its humming intensities, trompe l’oeil effects, and liminal atmospheres, Turrell’s work re-enchants perception: light returns as a pure object of contemplation. Of course, More …
Coinciding this year with High Desert Test Sites’ week-long art event, HDTS 2013, was artist Angela de la Agua’s This Desert, That Desert, a roving self-portrait photography project that followed the High Desert Test Sites event route. De la Agua lives in Joshua Tree, CA, where HDTS is also based, and she has established her reputation on Tumblr where she publishes daily self-portraits that she shoots in the desert outside Joshua More …
One great American genre is the tale of “what almost was and what might have been.” In Hollywood they call the glittery place where this happens the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, now living up to its name as a neighborhood where runaways wander amid syringes, steel gates and homeless-proof benches. It’s the tragedy of talent unfulfilled, of promise snuffed out young. All this is the stuff of film — one More …