Vive le Salon!
This piece was first published in 2008. Throwback Friday! The Art Salon takes the art dialogue away from the exhibitionism of the public square, back to the privacy of personal circles, even the intimacy of the home. Salons first became popular among the nobility of 17th century Europe as a time when the comtesse and her girlfriends got together to hear about things that mattered - in the salon, their equivalent o...
Midway through aMike Rose Semester
Photo by Alexandre Laurin Rita, a student of mine, came to my office last week to discuss an upcoming paper. "How's your research going?" I asked. "I am a bad writer," she said. At the start of the semester, Rita wrote an essay describing the shame she felt whenever she sat down at the computer. Sentences conspired to reinforce her feelings of inadequacy. When she asked people to help her, they labeled her a...
Where is the Cinema?Some Cities and Films in 2008
In his 1986 book about America, Baudrillard gets to Los Angeles and asks: "Where is the cinema?" His odd response: "It is all around you outside, all over the city, that marvelous, continuous performance of films and scenarios." In France or the Netherlands, one walks out of a theater or gallery into a city that is the source text for the paintings and landscapes you have just seen. What Baudrillard discovered in his...
Notes From a Budget Truck
My wife and I are moving from Los Angeles to New York, it's the middle of January, and I never thought I'd find myself so obsessed with the contents of a 16-foot Budget truck. Our route is long, tough, and snowy. My father has likened it to the Joad family tour except without nearly as much dust, death, or squatting down and squinting our eyes and picking up a handful of dirt and letting it run through our fi...
Performance and The Odd Lamb
Costumes, wacky songs, a restless crowd. No, this is not about Halloween; on a Thursday evening this past September, I acted as performer-assistant at a show by The Odd Lamb, a name among many under which artist Jonathan Atchley records. For me, having been a visual artist, now a curator and sometime gallerist who maybe harbors rock star fantasies, the realm of performance art is still completely fair game. As a ch...
Rethinking What It Means To Be “Made In America”
Made In America is a documentary film that explores the history and current realities of gang life in Los Angeles, California. While we've become accustomed to some pretty challenging topics on screen - global warming, evil consumerism, and political conspiracies included - most of us don't want a condemning finger pointed directly our way as we sit down to watch a movie. We'd prefer the message masked in metaphor, s...
