I wrote the following review in 2006 after seeing the exhibit Agitated Images: John Heartfield and German Photomontage, at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California. That LA artists have not made a bigger deal over the exhibition of works by John Heartfield currently at the Getty Museum, is a perfect example of the cool indifference and political disengagement plaguing…
The Peace Tower is a powerful statement of protest. By constructing it outside the museum’s entrance for all to see, Mark and Rirkrit remain true to the spirit of the original. The tower gives us a chorus of artists’ voices in a public reminder that art is being made in a world that is, in the words of Antonin Artaud,…
An important new opinion poll reveals that Americans know more about The Simpsons cartoon TV show than about the US Constitution. Conducted by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum, the poll found that only 28 percent of those surveyed could name more than one of the five freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment to the US Constitution, while almost twice as…
Apparently St. Mary Magdalene was from Afghanistan. While looking through an online edition of the Washington Post I discovered an article they ran about Mary Magdalene, which was accompanied by the illustration shown below. The graphic had the following caption: “This handout image released by the Grace Cathedral shows an icon of St. Mary Magdalene, the principal woman disciple of…
Furious and snarling, the Sex Pistols exploded onto the world stage in 1977. Their anti-authoritarian stance, expressed in songs like Anarchy in the UK and God Save The Queen, outraged society and turned the music world upside down. As the years passed, more and more people started to recognize how great a rock band the Pistols actually were, and while…
I groaned when I first read that rocker turned postmodern artist, David Byrne, had written a musical about Imelda Marcos titled Here Lies Love. Does the world really need another de-politicized musical ala Evita? The musical premiered at the 2006 Adelaide Arts Festival in Australia. Byrne collaborated with British DJ Fatboy Slim to produce the musical. The Adelaide Arts Festival…
Andy Warhol’s statement that “every person will be world-famous for fifteen minutes,” was an amazing insight into a consumerist culture driven by media, but he hardly could have imagined that artists would someday be interviewed in virtual publications that exist in a place called cyberspace. Here’s my fifteen minutes of world fame, as the LAist website put questions to me…
On February 16, 2006 Australia’s Special Broadcasting Services (SBS) program Dateline aired previously unpublished video and photos taken by US troops at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003. The damning pictures show Iraqi prisoners bound, naked, wounded, some covered in blood or excrement – undergoing abuse at the hands of their American jailers. Caution: this essay contains violent imagery not suitable…
