Every year, Pantone, the 50-year-old company famous for forecasting which colors will be popular when, names a color of the year. This year, it's emerald green, a color of “elegance and beauty” that enhances “our sense of well-being.” Artist Meg Cranston follows such forecasts closely, and, for her current show at LAXArt in Culver City, she painted two walls emerald. She also painted a picture of Kate Middleton in that green dress she wore last May and hung it against the smaller of the two walls. It must be a coincidence that Cranston's show opened just weeks after a speech by the British novelist Hilary Mantel made highbrow and lowbrow headlines alike (the novelist called the duchess “precision-made,” capable of “going from perfect bride to perfect mother, with no messy deviation”). But both Cranston and Mantel chose Kate as a stand-in for the same thing — the unsettling idea that personality and style, things that should be idiosyncratic, could be perfectly packaged and predictable. 2640 S. La Cienega Blvd.; through April 20. (323) 868-5893, laxart.org.

Tuesdays-Saturdays. Starts: March 2. Continues through April 20, 2013

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