Superheroes in Court! Lawyers, Law and Comic Books
Currently on display at Lillian Goldman Law Library’s rare book exhibition gallery at Yale the series showcases examples of images of superheroes in the dock, comic books about lawyers and examples of legal disputes and Congressional inquiries involving caped crusaders. My artist sense tells me somewhere a lawyer who loves comics is currently on kayak.com reserving a seat on the next flight to New Haven, CT. Read more here & here

Merchandise Mart adds LA to the portfolio of Art Fairs
Planed to open in fall of 2011 (want to lay odds it is close if not the same time as Scope: London & Zoo?) the Chicago based Merchandise Mart has hired MOCA’s Adam Gross as director of the event. Read more here

The Art on the Walls of Wall Street 2
Even though the original Wall Street film was a better story and all around film it did lack in a few areas most of all it’s representation of art. Work, design and taste that is so garish and laughably over the top that it is highly distracting from the story being told. In the sequal the art is more established and used as pantomime of the duplicitous emotions, mood or subtext of the film. The NY Times wrote and interesting article on the process. Read more here

Egyptian Van Gogh Heist now thought to be an inside job
A while back there was the report of a Van Gogh theft from the Mohamed Mahmoud Khalil Museum which had the art security equivalent of a ADT window decal and nothing more (seven out of 43 security cameras functioning and none of the alarms attached to the museum’s paintings) now the talk is that it was an inside job. This very well may be true but llet me ask how hard was the planning session for that theft? How complex could it have been since the only thing to slow one down from a theft was remembering if it was a push or pull door at the exit? Habib el-Adly, Egypt’s interior minister, said the loss was a “difficult lesson”…. Read more here

Google brings a rough version of a actual usable universal translator
called “conversation mode” which in the art world we could all use more then we would like to admit.

As of June 1st if you are stuck in LA traffic you have one more option added to your short list of ways to pass the 72 hours a year you spend on the road: music, cell phone, yelling at the drivers around you & now existentialist puppet theater. Yes a theater in the back of a pickup that talks about chaos, control & the role of mankind in this short time we have on earth.

Artist Joel Kyack & Peter Fuller perform from the back of their white nondescript pickup truck and via short range radio broadcasts the spoken/soundtrack performance material is available to nearby drivers to have a relaxed intimate theater of the mind at 5mph.

Every performance of Superclogger except for two special showings will be during evening rush hours on different freeways across LA (The list is below) until September 24th. After that it will appear at the Hammer Museum, September 25th, 1-4pm. The Hammer Museum is located at 10899 Wilshire BoulevardLos Angeles, CA 90024.

Performance Dates & Locations

June 11

110 N & 110 S Fwys (Between Downtown and Hollywood)

July 2

10 E Fwy (Between PCH and Downtown)

July 9

5 S Fwy (Between China Town and Bell Gardens)

July 16

134 W Fwy (Between Glendale and Sherman Oaks)

July 30

60 E Fwy (Between East Los Angeles and South San Gabriel)

August 13

10 E Fwy (Between Monterey Park and El Monte)

September 10

10 E Fwy (Between PCH and Downtown)

September 24

210 E Fwy (Between Pasadena and Duarte)

Christopher Knight, the Los Angeles Times Art Critic has written up an interesting article on Jeffrey Deitch’s start as Director (the fourth in 30 years) and gives his point of view on where the reality of life in LA can begin to match the goals of the Museum. Numbers mater in the Art world even if we don’t want to talk about it and MOCA’s attendance has been dropping steadily for years. Couple that with the fiscal mismanagement gamble back in 2008 where they created a budget that relied on donor money to cover around 80% of the cost (money that evaporated with the crash) and things were pretty bleak.

The consensus & expectation is that Jeffrey Deitch will bring the kind of shows and energy that will rally the general population of LA and raise attendance above it’s current 600 people a day. Think about that, 600 people, more people visit this site then MOCA in a given day and MOCA is spending $20 Million a year. MOCA has a wonderful collection and this isn’t a referendum by the people of LA on Art but on the growing disconnect between Art Tastemakers and the general population. A rift that has been growing for years with little to no abatement.

It’s not just LA, we have had the same debates on hours of operation & marketing of events in Chicago for over 5 years. Christopher Knight goes on to offer his advice on what Mr. Deitch might want to examine as Director and the second I can agree with aspects of, the first not so much:

1. General admission: take it from $10 to free

I have always questioned why everything needs to be free. In my experience people have a habit of discounting what they don’t pay for and it effects the overall opinion. Work at a bar (or the music industry these days) and you can see that in action, lines and a small cover even if they are annoying increase the overall pleasure of the experience as long as guests expectations are met once they enter. Also even if the door charge is less then 10% of the budget that is still a valuable/usefull daily cash flow even for an institution of that size. Art like any other business lives and breathes on cash flow.

I would suggest price pointing it at $5 a person and make it free to seniors, students & active military (for many solid reasons not worth rehashing here). At that price it has a real value, is proportioned correctly to films, concerts & other nightlife activities and doesn’t nullify the whole selling point of yearly membership.

2. Hours of Operation: take it from closing at 5-6pm & 8pm on Thursday to more befitting late nights.

No argument but very tricky and might not be as useful as even I thought years ago. This just might be a tourist/weekday local/weekend world we live in.

The one thing that Mr. Knight doesn’t tackle is the one thing that everyone is so afraid of about Jeffrey Dietch as Director, the “curatorial” focus of the exhibits and I think more so “how they are marketed to the world”. Everyone is waiting on baited breath since it seems no one has faith that an intelligent discussion on Art can be molded into a form of interest to the general public. That is the great experiment going on in LA and if it is successful could echo throughout the American Art World as a whole and faster then you might think.

This coming week the awesome people at ForYourArt and five other blogs are putting together Postopolis! LA. If you’re in LA it looks like something you should check out.

via Postopolis! LA
On the occasion of Los Angeles Art Weekend, Storefront for Art and Architecture and ForYourArt are pleased to announce Postopolis! LA, a live five-day event of near-continuous conversation about architecture, art, urbanism, landscape, and design to be held in Los Angeles from 31 March to 4 April 2009. Six bloggers, from five different cities around the world, will host a series of discussions,
interviews, slideshows, panels, talks, and presentations, fusing the informal energy and interdisciplinary approach of the architectural blogosphere with the immediacy of face-to-face interaction.

Hosted By: ArchDaily/Plataforma Arquitectura, BLDGBLOG , City of
Sound, Subtopia , Mudd Up!, We Make Money Not Art

For More info please visit Postopolis.

This week the West Coast Crew heads down to Ratio3 to talk to Ryan McGinley and gallerist Chris Perez.

Ryan McGinley makes large-scale color photographs of nudes in abstracted natural landscapes. With his subjects as willing collaborators, he used photography to break down barriers between public and private lives. Drawn from skateboarding, music, graffiti and gay subcultures, his models perform for the camera and expose themselves with complete self-awareness.

McGinley’s more recent work signals a departure from the urban youth culture images for which he is well known – over the past few summers he has been working almost exclusively in natural settings in the American west.

At 24, he was the youngest artist to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He has also had solo exhibitions at PS1 and in Spain at the MUSAC in Leon. In 2007 he was awarded the Young Photographer Infinity award by the International Center for Photography.
Read more