Chris Burden

10 Great Places to Eat on New Year's Day

January 1st. The first day of the new year on the old Gregorian calendar. For most of the Western world, it's a day to start fresh, assess things, make pledges to change and maybe just beg the sweet merciful gods to make the room stop spinning because goddamn you over-indulged the night before. No ... More >>

L.A.'s Best Arts & Culture Apps

LACMA Rock Finally Opens to the Public. But Does It Live Up to Expectations?

"When the rock is installed, will I stand under it and experience its massive weight?" wondered artist Dai Toyofuku, when I spoke with him him back in March. "Will I feel like it might crush me?" The 340-ton granite boulder, soon to be the centerpiece of Michael Heizer's sculpture Levitated Mass, ha ... More >>

Franklin Sirmans: His Fun Is Showing

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2012 issue. Check out our entire People 2012 issue here. The art world sometimes takes itself too seriously. Franklin Sirmans doesn't. But that doesn't mean he isn't a serious player. He just knows how to have fun, even while doing s ... More >>

3MG featuring Murs - LACMA - 5-17-11

3MG LACMA 5-17-11 See also: Murs on How His Family's Dry-Cleaning Business Survived the Riots Better Than... the DMC show LACMA put on a few months back in the Bing Theater. I love DMC, but that shindig was awkward. Composed of Murs, Eligh and Scarub, 3MG reunited for a performance last night at ... More >>

Pasadena's PST Shows Make Everyday Things Into Art, Like Porn and Furniture

It's high time to brave the Pasadena Freeway, thanks to four landmark Pacific Standard Time shows with ambitious curators, catalogues, and historical reach in Pasadena. Pasadena/San Marino has its PST "focus" weekend this Saturday and Sunday, which means lots of extra events. Michael Duncan's "LA R ... More >>

What is Performance Art?

Are Lady Gaga and Mitt Romney performance artists? The mainstream press has said so, and there's not much to stop them. As an artistic practice, performance art is what happens when an event or action is framed for an audience. Which means it could be anything, really. So what distinguishes self-awa ... More >>

Black Flag's Damaged Changed Punk, and L.A.

30 Years Later, Its Impact Is Still Felt

11 New Restaurants for New Year's Eve

Anne FishbeinPicca​On New Year's Eve, restaurants celebrate with live bands, festive décor, theme dinners, exceptional ingredients, multi-course meals, tasting menus and endless glasses of bubbly. How to choose the best spot? We've selected 11 restaurants that opened in 2011 to represent a ... More >>

'The Lords & The New Creatures' at Nye Brown: How Jim Morrison's Poetry Book Inspired an L.A. Art Show About Cars

"Modern life is a journey by car." This sentence could have been written yesterday, but it actually appeared in The Lords and the New Creatures, Jim Morrison's first book of published poetry in 1971. Forty years later, little has changed: The car is still king in Los Angeles. Now, a group show t ... More >>

Ten Revelations from Pacific Standard Time's Opening Press Event at the Getty

Copyright Billy Al Bengston, Billy Al Bengston studio holdings, photo by Brian Forrest Billy Al Bengston's painting Sonny, now at the Getty as part of Pacific Standard Time​ Pacific Standard Time has arrived! Sort of. At least for the press. This morning the Getty held the opening press confe ... More >>

Cy Twombly and Los Angeles: A Shaky Relationship

Photo credit: Paula Goldman. Courtesy MOCA LA. A view of the 1995 Cy Twombly retrospective at MOCA​ The painter Cy Twombly, who died Tuesday at the age of 83, has always, perhaps unfairly, been associated with high culture headiness. Sure, he came of age in New York alongside pop forerunners ... More >>

Bas Jan Ader, Zoe Crosher, and the Art of Disappearing People

No Strings Attached Review

High-concept director Ivan Reitman goes low-key for believable romantic comedy

Over the Weekend: The Final L.A. Show of ISIS

Over the Weekend: The Final L.A. Show of ISIS

Sounds of the Skin of a Rabbit

And other West Coasty musical predilections

The James Beard Foundation's Invitational: Food and Cocktails Duke It Out

From 6:30 p.m. until the lights rose at 2:00 a.m. this past Monday (well, Tuesday), Squid Ink put in a full work day at The James Beard Foundation's L.A. Chef Invitational at The Foundry. As enjoyable as the evening was, good food and classic cocktails are difficult to mix. Eric Greenspan noted th ... More >>

The Long, Hot Summer of L.A. Film

L.A., world movie capital, may indeed suffer from having too much of a good thing

Keeping Up With China (Adams)

The fine art of doing without

Getty Curator Glenn Phillips on the "California Video" Show

Playing with the camera

Cracked Egg: BCAM's Inaugural Show

Hello ... Wrong

LACMA + BCAM = A FUTURE

The not-so-little engine that could

The Never-ending Exploration

Justin Beal likes his art open-ended

Art Utopia

Jim Shaw and Marnie Weber have it made — and so do their assistants

Resistance Is Futile

How Takashi Murakami remade the world in his image

Outlaws and In-laws

Our readers write back

L.A. à la Pompidou

State Of Emergence

Undiscovered cracks in the art-world infrastructure: a catalog

The Great Unknown

A Mullican stew

Tofu, Smut and “dunt dunnnt, dunt dunnt”

Empire of the Senses

Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon’s dynamite painter

The Bear Essentials

Carlee Fernandez’s Visual Anthropomorphism

Letters

Don’t Look Back

Mike Kelley’s Proposal

Silver Clouds

Warhol, post-9/11

Guerrilla Public Service: The Man Who Would Be Caltrans

Holiday Trimmings

Vallance, McCarthy, Besemer, Ott, Calabrese, more

Family Matters

This year's blockbuster domestic documentary

Absolut Hot and Absolut Not

The L.A. International Biennial Invitational . . . whatever

Battle of the Bads

Longest-Living Two-Headed Person

And other noteworthy people and events of the 20th century

Critical Mass

From Johanna Went to Madame Tussaud: 20 years of arts coverage

What is a Photograph

Lewis Baltz ponders that and other questions of life in the Corporate State