Writing 2014 & Earlier
“The Hardest Work I Have Ever Done”: “Dropout Piece” by Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer
Catherine G. Wagley, July 23, 2014
IN 1959, AT the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s 80th Annual, the queen of England stopped to admire a painting by Lee Lozano. Lozano, older than most of the other art students at 29, had a tomboyish bowl cut and a loose, expressionistic approach to painting bodies and objects. Elizabeth II happened to whisk through the show during 14 quick hours in Chicago and, according to the local papers, she liked Lozano’s painting of a seated figure best. It’s just one of many times the artist would brush up against kinds of greatness far more defined and straightforward than her own.
THE INTERSECTION OF STAND-UP COMEDY AND THE ART WORLD
Catherine Wagley, September 25, 2014
It was hot and stuffy, and comedian James Adomian was performing on a stage in the Highland Park art space Public Fiction, under a spotlight. Hovering behind him was an inflatable globe — or the globe could be in front of him, depending which way he turned, since audience members sat on all sides. It was helping him with his jokes. He'd just told a great one about how David Bowie's Space Oddity is evidence for why the Brits never got their space program off the ground. “He gets up there, and he's, like, 'I'm floating in the most peculiar way,'” Adomian said, relying on his British glam-rocker accent while using the globe to demonstrate how far off Bowie's narrator must have been when he noticed “Planet Earth is blue and there's nothing I can do.” It was when Adomian started prodding the globe with the microphone stand, doing his version of a WWII-era British officer (“The Germans are here, and here, and here”) that the globe went tumbling down into the audience.
IS GREED GOOD FOR ART?
Catherine G. Wagley, June 26, 2014
“I'm the hedgehog, Stefan's the fox,” said Jonathan T.D. Neil last night. Neil is an art critic, academic and director of the L.A. Sotheby's Institute of Art, a graduate program based out of Claremont. He was comparing himself to Stefan Simchowitz, the art advisor, collector and patron who's become known, and villainized for, being market savvy. The two men were debating the state of the art world last night at a space called Blacklisted in WeHo, right near the L.A. headquarters of Sotheby's Auction House. Someone had asked what made them different. Were they even that different?
“Stefan has more money,” Neil offered.