Doug Harvey

The California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art is a tradition dating back to 1984, when the venue was known as the Newport Harbor Art Museum and its chief curator was Paul Schimmel, now at L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art. The Orange County museum was renamed OCMA in......

Cinema is a strangely autistic medium, often offering aid and encouragement to obviously pathological misanthropes, which isn't really a problem when that translates primarily into the form and content of their work — look at Stan Brakhage. Unfortunately, what you get when it translates further — into the very socioeconomic......

For most of us, one of the fundamental appeals of art is its exemplary capacity in the struggle against entropy — a cultural artifact is valued according to the degree of order it embodies — and the strength of its resistance to the ravages of time. The more intricately woven......

Click here for "L.A. Weekly Critics' Choices: Highlights From the Fall Season." Click here for "Lari's Signature: Why Pittman matters," by Christopher Miles. Click here for "Musical Art Spaces: Openings, closures and reopenings," by Shana Nys Dambrot. Until I finally saw them standing next to each other at a barbecue......

What makes things meaningful? Is it the mere indication that something meaningful is, in fact, present? Is it the attention we then invest in it? Is it our capacity to subsequently rationalize that experiential phenomenon into a communicable verbal analog: to describe it in words? Is it in the act......

Arshile Gorky is a pivotal but enigmatic figure in the history of Modern Art — specifically in the alleged shifting of the narrative center of Capital-A Art from Paris to New York somewhere around World War II. Gorky was a quintessential example of American self-reinvention: a figurehead to the ab-ex......

I've never been to Burning Man. The annual pyrotechno countercultural powwow held in the desert north of Reno — a multigenerational touchstone for the post-'60s consciousness-expansion crowd — has always seemed suspiciously contrived to me. If not as one of those Nineteen-Eighty-Four antique-shop faux–Temporary Autonomous Zones designed by The Man......

Has it been 10 years since sculpture-based multimedia artist Tim Hawkinson's last commercial gallery show in L.A.? There was an exhibition at Ace immediately after his Whitney-organized retrospective hit LACMA in 2005, but if I recall correctly it was composed of back stock. Hawkinson was already negotiating his move to......

Once upon a time a boy named Pierre went into the woods ... actually he first went to the San Fernando Valley — it wasn't until much later that he made it to the woods, although clearly it was worth the wait. The Pierre in question is Pierre Picot, an......