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How Much Is MOCA Making From MOCAtv?
MOCAtv, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s newly launched YouTube channel, isn’t PBS, and it’s not MTV. Least of all is it the usual run of museum-produced video. Remember the floating head of John...
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Llyn Foulkes’ Stiffs, Stooges, and Bloody Heads
For forty years Llyn Foulkes has been painting “bloody heads”—mutilated, eyeless faces of male power figures. Like Francis Bacon’s screaming Magdalenes, they are hermetic emblems of postmodern angst....
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Baldessari Meets “Dr. Death”
The Art Newspaper reports that John Baldessari has been unable to secure a dead body for his long-planned Cadaver Piece. Conceived in 1970, it would involve a tableaux vivant of Mantegna’s The...
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Is L.A. Ugly? Is Ugly Good?
“I live here because L.A. is ugly,” John Baldessari once said. Civic ungainliness spurs the art-creating instinct, he implied. That could be the subtext for a couple of current museum shows. The Getty...
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Quote of the Day: John Baldessari
“Jeffrey [Deitch] wasn’t disingenuous. He did what he does, and that’s what the museum wanted. But I think the real problem is the [MOCA] board. It’s a really nonfunctional board. They need to have a...
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Artists on Vergne
MOCA’s press release announcing Philippe Vergne’s appointment as director has quotes from all four of the artist-trustees who resigned in protest of Jeffrey Deitch’s leadership. Catherine Opie is...
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That 70’s Show
Whenever somebody writes the Jeffrey Deitch-MOCA biopic (opera?), the final act will turn on the disco show. Media leaks turned “Fire in the Disco,” Deitch’s scheme of recreating famous discos in a...
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Why Isn’t Every Museum an Artist’s Museum?
John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, and Catherine Opie have rejoined the MOCA board, along with Mark Grotjahn. That brings the number of artist-trustees back to four. I’ve never understood why the...
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Mike Kelley’s Killer Clown
“Mass Murderer Paints Pictures in Prison—& Warped Art Collectors Buy His Junk!” That Feb. 13, 1990, National Enquirer headline referred to serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who was then selling his...
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All of John Baldessari’s Tattoos
Tattoo artists are currently featured in shows at the Japanese American National Museum and the El Segundo Museum of Art. Meanwhile the Hammer Museum is offering a set of five temporary tattoos...
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Raymond Roussel, Godfather of Conceptualism
Pierre Huyghe, now subject of a LACMA show, has credited Raymond Roussel (above, 1877-1933) as a key influence on his work. Roussel was an eccentric poet, novelist, and playwright who was much admired...
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Quote of the Day: John Baldessari
“You can’t beat Bernard Buffet. He’s the best at being the worst.” —John Baldessari, in Vogue (Shown, Buffet’s Clown, Yellow Background, 1985)
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