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History painting, what a joke! There is only one authentic thing: to paint what you see.

— Édouard Manet (Jan 23, 1832 – Apr 30, 1883)

• RT @smithsonian: A city built from $32k of discarded lottery tickets? Artist Jean Shin did it. Watch her work: http://ow.ly/L0oN #

• RT @smithsonian: How about a slide show of artists’ homemade holiday cards? http://ow.ly/Ki2k #

• RT @MOCAlosangeles: MOCA ? YOU! Complimentary Museum Admission | SUNDAY, NOV 15–FRIDAY, NOV 20 | more info at http://bit.ly/46urQb #
• If Jimmy cracks corn, and no one cares, why does he keep doing it? #
• No hell, no dignity, no hope. Have a great day! #
• My wife's in LA at the Thai markets. She'll bring back those little coconut pancakes. I love coconut pancakes! #

The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.

— Emile Zola

People err who think my art comes easily to me. I assure you, dear friend, nobody has devoted so much time and thought to composition as I. There is not a famous master whose music I have not industriously studied through many times.

— Mozart

Visual artist Chino Otsuka has created composite images of her past and present selves, like a digital time machine. This is so good. Otsuka’s work has restored my faith in humanity, which was pulverized a couple of days ago by the news that Ashton Kutcher has a million followers on Twitter.

I have a rule of thumb about art and artists: If a normal person has no hope of seeing the point of your work without an accompanying explanation about you and your artistic “theory” — you suck.

I look at Otsuka’s photos and with no words at all I’m immediately transported, I’m weeping with joy at the possibilities of life . . .

If,
again
I have a chance to meet,
there is so much I want to ask
and so much I want to tell.

— Chino Otsuka

If you could go back and meet yourself as a child, what would you say?

When I look at photographs of myself as a boy, I see someone whose parents were not cut out to be parents, who, when they turned their attention to the boy at all, it was to tell him how disappointing and inadequate he was.

I see a boy who has taken that to heart, and will grow up with it, and even though as an adult he’ll eventually learn to compensate and in some cases overcompensate for it, will always know in his heart that he’s inadequate because his parents taught him that he was.

I’d like to go back and meet that boy and tell him that I love him. That’s all.

We have artists with no scientific knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is ghastly. The time for a real reunification of art and technology is really long overdue.

— Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

In this image supplied by Greenpeace, U.S. artist Spencer Tunick and Greenpeace Switzerland present hundreds of naked people to symbolize the vulnerability of glaciers under climate change.

Is that what it’s supposed to symbolize?

What did it symbolize when he photographed hundreds of naked people in Venezuela, France, Britain, etc., etc., etc.

Isn’t anyone else bored out of their minds with this idiot yet? He’s like that miscreant who dresses up Weimaraners, and everyone else who has one limited idea and keeps repeating it over and over and over.

I don’t claim to be a great artist, but let me tell you how this glacier shoot should have been done:

You put the hundreds of people on the glacier, at which time they discover to their dismay that they’re stuck there like a tongue on a lamppost. You leave them there to slowly starve to death and decompose.

It reeks of symbolism . . .

One thing you can’t help noticing in spending a day at LACMA, what with the proximity to West Hollywood and all, is that gay guys really like art.

I mentioned that to my son and his response was “Case in point: you,” which wasn’t very nice.

He’s not much of an art lover . . . I admit that I occasionally drag him along to an art museum, because I feel like he should know at least a little bit about it whether he likes it or not.

On our way back to Orange County — in keeping with my mission of introducing the boy to the finer things in life — we stopped off at the original Tommy’s stand at Beverly and Rampart, not only an L.A. landmark, but a favorite of USC students for decades, where you can still get — as the boy did — a double chili cheeseburger, fries and a drink for $5.40.

Apologies to Pete Townshend, but I’d call that a bargain!

We drove out to LACMA last weekend to see The Modern West: American Landscapes, 1890-1950, and Re-SITE-ing the West: Contemporary Photographs from the Permanent Collection.

I love exhibits like this . . . I’ve lived in California my whole life and I feel like these Western landscapes are part of my DNA.

While we were there, we also took in the Dan Flavin retrospective. Flavin’s work consists of standard fluorescent tubes arranged in patterns not beyond the imagination of the average six-year-old.

I tried viewing them up close, far away, from the side . . . I couldn’t make heads or tails of any of it.

LACMA helpfully provided a detailed theory of Flavin’s work in the form of a fold-out brochure with a lot of small print, but I didn’t read it. Isn’t art supposed to provide some sort of pleasure and/or illumination — pardon the pun — on its own merits?

I was reminded of Tom Wolfe’s epiphany in The Painted Word, that the distinction between, say, a Jackson Pollock painting and the splatterings of a kindergartener is that the kindergartener’s work lacks a persuasive critical theory:

All these years, in short, I had assumed that in art, if nowhere else, seeing is believing. Well–how very shortsighted! Now, at last, on April 28, 1974, I could see. I had gotten it backward all along. Not “seeing is believing,” you ninny, but “believing is seeing,” for Modern Art has become completely literary: the paintings and other works only exist to illustrate the text.

In case you don’t recognize the woman in the painting, it’s Angelina Jolie (as the Virgin Mary) with her kids, hovering in the heavens above a Wal-Mart.

I took my son to the new Landscape Confection exhibit at the Orange County Museum of Art today. I don’t know much about art, but I do have a couple rules of thumb:

Continue reading A Day at the Art Museum with a 7th Grader