After 31 years of covering Art and Culture in Southern California, this is the last Art Talk that I am presenting on KCRW. It has been a privilege and an honor, my friends – and I mean that sincerely – to speak to you for three decades about the Arts in our City of Angels. Installation shots, Alex Israel at the Huntington. 2016. The Huntington. Photos by Edward Goldman. When I started my Art Talks, the LA art scene was so much smaller. Back then, after finishing each program, I would scratch my head wondering, “How the hell am I going to find something equally interesting and important to ..read more

OK, my friends. The subject of today’s Art Talk is the provocative and explicit art of British artist Sarah Lucas, currently on display at Hammer Museum. The tongue-in- cheek title of the exhibition, Au Naturel, is a French phrase meaning “in the nude.” And nudity – plenty of nudity – fills the many museum galleries in the form of sculptures, photographs, videos, and installations.  L & R: Installation shots: Sarah Lucas: Au Naturel. Hammer Museum. Photos by Edward Goldman. Born in 1962, Sarah Lucas received recognition as a member of the Young British Artists (YBA), a group of artists ..read more

Walking into Art & Empire: The Golden Age of Spain at the San Diego Museum of Art, a map on the wall reveals the geography behind the world’s most far -reaching empire from the 17th to 18th centuries. Red arrows describe the extensive trade routes from the Iberian Peninsula to New Spain, from much of what is now Southern California to the tip of South America, as well as the Caribbean, Philippines and parts of Italy and Belgium. The enormous wealth that resulted enabled unprecedented patronage by the church and monarchy, bringing masterpieces of Italian and Flemish art to Spain in the 15 ..read more

The photographic exhibition at the Getty Museum, Gordon Parks: The Flávio Story, will break your heart, make you think and hope, and even smile a little. In the early 1960s, Gordon Parks was already a well-known photographer. So, it was no surprise that he was chosen by LIFE magazine to go to Brazil to report about the extreme poverty in Rio de Janeiro. It was pure serendipity that Parks connected with a 12-year-old boy there, Flávio da Silva, and his family, living in the unimaginable poverty of a Brazilian favela. Installation shots: Gordon Parks: The Flávio Story. Getty Museum. Photos by ..read more

We listen to recorded books and audio newspapers. We read on our laptops and phones. Reading words on paper would seem to belong to the antiquated 20th century. That is not the position of dozens of small presses who publish novels, poetry and non-fiction, many of them right here on the West Coast. And this weekend they are gathered at the first Little Literary Festival being held at Hauser & Wirth, an art gallery downtown but also a publisher which is co-hosting with the L.A Review of Books. It is an opportunity to meet authors such as Tosh Berman, who will be signing his delightful m ..read more

The last two weekends, I enjoyed four nights of amazing dance performances – two times on stage, at The Music Center’s Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, and two times on the silver screen, at Laemmle’s Royal theatre. Screenshot from The Royal Ballet - Mayerling | Three Performances at The Music Center. Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=13&v=wbw4JFuIl1c  After 24 years, The Royal Ballet returned to Los Angeles to perform its signature work, Mayerling, created by famous choreographer Kenneth MacMillan in 1978. Set in 19 th century Vienna, it tells the story of royal dangerous ..read more

We tend to think of artists as people with sorts of egos that make them want to stay in the spotlight, to get attention. An exhibition of three important L.A. artists focuses, instead, on their various of methods of making themselves disappear. Aptly titled, Disappearing—California c. 1970 at the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, this show is the first to look in detail at the conceptually-based art of Chris Burden, Jack Goldstein and Bas Jan Ader. All of the artists are considered major figures in the art of their time and though they all lived in L.A. when it was a hot-house of great talent ..read more

Any good exhibition of contemporary art that presents cultural developments abroad is a welcome and important way to better understand our allies and adversaries. The ambitious traveling exhibition that opened last month at LACMA, Allure of Matter: Material Art from China, is an excellent example of artistic and cultural collaboration at a time of an ongoing trade war between the US and China. Song Dong. Water Records, 2010. Four-channel video projection; various durations. The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China. LACMA. Photo by Edward Goldman. An article from ARTnews quotes Pace Ga ..read more

The eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD is a well-known tragedy of the ancient world. Two nearby cities, Pompeii and Herculaneum, were destroyed, along with their populations. Everything was covered in layers upon layers of lava and ash. But somehow, this tragedy has a silver lining. Since the mid-18th century, archeological excavations of both cities have uncovered an unprecedented amount of artistic treasures – bronze and marble sculptures, well-preserved frescoes and mosaics, and the list goes on. Installation shots: Buried by Vesuvius: Treasures from the Villa dei Papiri. Getty Villa. L ..read more

If you had come from Lubbock, Texas to Los Angeles in 1962, as did artist Terry Allen, you’d come to believe that anything was possible. You could be an artist, or a songwriter or a musician. Allen became all of the above. You can see it all in a survey of his art at a galllery in Venice. The Exact Moment it Happens in the West: Stories, Pictures and Songs from the 1960s to Now. Most of the drawings on view have not been shown before and they clarify the purpose of his serpentine art with its various detours and road blocks. Allen, now 76, calls Lubbock a place “so flat that if you look ..read more