WARP, the Spanish language glossy magazine from Mexico that focuses on the international contemporary music scene, arts, culture, cinema, and more, conducted an interview with me that appeared in the monthly’s July 2010 print edition. Under the headline of, “Music Against The Machine,” WARP Magazine #28 was a special edition dedicated to those bands, performers, and individuals who have spoken…
On June 23, 2010, I wrote a missive regarding the financial ties the Los Angeles County Museum of Art maintains with the U.K. oil company, BP (British Petroleum). My tongue-in-cheek piece sarcastically incriminated Freewaves, the L.A.-based new media arts organization, for displaying videos at LACMA’s so-called “BP Grand Entrance” in an official LACMA program on June 26, 2010. My remarks…
As BP’s broken underwater oil well in the Gulf of Mexico continues to gush over 100,000 barrels of oil per day into the fragile ecosystem, and as sheets of the thick sticky crude start to fill the delicate marsh lands of the Mississippi Delta – Greenpeace UK has launched an art competition to redesign the BP corporate logo. The contest…
In 1989 the Guatemalan Information Center (GIC), a human rights organization founded by a group of Guatemalan exiles living in Los Angeles, commissioned me to create a poster. Its purpose was to announce the Guatemalan Human Rights Tribunal, a public forum the GIC was planning to hold in the Council Chambers of Los Angeles City Hall on the subject of…
The British Art Resistance (B.A.R.) has organized National Art Hate Week for “the disruptive betterment of culture” and for purposes of giving UK bourgeois art institutions “a necessary kicking.” Sarcastically modeled after the two-minute hate rallies found in George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, Art Hate events will encourage people to express contempt for “the business of culture” as well as…
An unavoidable political topic is on the lips of everyone in the art world these days, I am not speaking of the U.S. presidential election – but of an international economic meltdown the likes of which we have not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. No matter what “new” political circumstances we wake up to in the aftermath…
In a major trial that challenged an artist’s right to free expression, the British artist Michael Dickinson, who lives in Turkey, was prosecuted by the Turkish government in 2006 for creating a photo-collage seen as “insulting the dignity of the prime minister.” Dickinson faced years in prison for his artwork, but on September 25, 2008, the judge in the case…
The group, Saffron Revolution Worldwide (SRW) has created stencil art in support of the people’s uprising for democracy in Burma, also known as Myanmar. SRW encourages groups and individuals around the world to download the stencil template, utilizing it to create spray-paint stencil art in deep orange paint as an expression of solidarity with Burma’s marching monks. If making stencil…
