The culture vultures have descended. On Nov. 20, 2025 Sotheby’s New York auctioned a 1949 self-portrait by Frida Kahlo. It is titled El sueño (La cama) or The Dream (The bed) in English. The auction house expected a very big fish to purchase it! Sotheby’s sold the painting for $54.7 million. Sotheby’s said the artwork “offers a spectral meditation on…
On April 13, 2025, the antediluvian punk rock band from Los Angeles, the Circle Jerks, performed at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival. Singer Keith Morris, a co-founder of the Jerks, told the concert goers: “What we do encourage, what would be totally f**king happening, would be an army of Luigis!“ Keith Morris founded the Circle Jerks in 1979,…
On the night of July 26, 2025 in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Antifa vandals defaced the city’s monument to Mary Washington—mother of George Washington. The historic 1894 memorial was desecrated with a black spray-painted circled Ⓐ symbol of anarchism along with the word “Antifa.” The criminal misdeed was first reported by Washington Heritage Museums (WHM), a nonprofit citizens group dedicated to preserving…
In large part this is a personal account of how MacArthur Park has been a continual background setting for my life in Los Angeles. When I viewed the July 7, 2025 video of MacArthur Park in the Westlake neighborhood of Los Angeles, being swept by officers from ICE to enforce federal immigration law—all I could think of was the 1968…
On June 19, 2025, three members of the eco-extremist group known as Last Generation Canada (Dernière Génération Canada), vandalized an oil painting by Pablo Picasso on exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Canada. The radical group identified their vandal as Marcel—age 21. Sometime around 10:30 am, the three extremists entered an exhibit hall where Picasso’s 1901 oil…
You might be dismayed to learn that many contemporary statue makers are cheaters when it comes to fashioning sculptures from bronze or marble. Even individuals involved in the arts might be shocked to discover that present-day “sculptors” have never touched clay or marble, let along cast a statue in bronze. I believe that’s the case with Grounded in the Stars,…
Trendy Bricklane in London’s East End is awash with lowbrow graffiti “art.” It is the perfect ugly urbanscape for a father & son “street art” duo known as “Grow Up.” They recently plastered the spray-painted walls of Bricklane with a new poster series they call—The Turd Reich. I’m uncomfortable posting Nazi imagery, but it’s important not to sanitize the hateful…
In 2023 the singer Mehdi Yarrahi was arrested in Iran for releasing a song inspiring women to take off their hijabs. In the Islamic Republic of Iran wearing a hijab is compulsory for women. Yarrahi spent a year in prison for his “crime.” On Mar. 6, 2025 he was given 74 lashes by his tormentors. On his X account (@yarrahimehdi)…
