The first day of summer in 2017 was June 20, but the date also marked another occasion, that of the 50th Anniversary of the 1967 Summer of Love in San Francisco, California. Remarkably enough in 1967 I passed though that Haight Ashbury scene as a wide-eyed, impressionable 14 year old, and what I saw there never left me. In fact…
In 2004, Thomas Kinkade published reproductions of his painting, Heading Home, a schmaltzy and manipulative piece of classic war propaganda. But the title of Kinkade’s over-sentimental artwork is unhappily far from the truth, it should properly be titled – Shipping Out. With today’s U.S. military casualties in Iraq reaching 3,441 at the time of this article, and with the Pentagon…
Vivienne Westwood is one of today’s biggest names in the world of fashion design, and her creations have been considered so significant that England’s Victoria & Albert Museum mounted a retrospective of her career in 2004. Westwood began her career as a fashionista in 1971 when she teamed up with Malcolm McLaren, the vainglorious manager of the Sex Pistols, to…
I’m working on a new series of large oil paintings depicting the ubiquitous palm trees of Los Angeles, set on fire and blazing away against L.A.’s photochemical sunsets. The works allude to the intrinsic wildness of my city, where every year the surrounding hills are swept by fire, a phenomenon experienced by no other major metropolis on earth. It is…
I’m showing a number of artworks at Religion, Politics and Society, a group exhibit that also features artists, John Paul Thornton, Dolores Guerrero-Torres, Paul Batou, and David Ross. The exhibition is at the Lake Arrowhead Gallery and Museum of Art (LAGMA), located in the beautiful mountain resort community of Lake Arrowhead, California, in the San Bernardino National Forest. For those…
There’s an old adage that goes, “First they break your legs, and then they want thanks for giving you crutches.” New York City’s, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum has mounted an exhibit that adheres to that truism. Dedicated exclusively to historic and contemporary design, Cooper-Hewitt’s exhibition, Design for the Other 90 %, is the museum’s presentation of innovative tools allegedly created…
May 4th, 2007 marks the 37th anniversary of the shooting deaths of four students by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State University. It seems few remember those who were felled by bullets during national anti-Vietnam war protests triggered by President Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia. The killings represent a monstrous crime… and we must never forget the students gunned down…
Jed Perl is the art critic for The New Republic, and after reading his essay, Laissez-Faire Aesthetics: What money is doing to art, or how the art world lost its mind, it’s not hard to understand why his opinion of contemporary art is generally reviled in some quarters. While I disagree with aspects of Perl’s critique, he still manages to…
