KCRW's Art Talk Podcasts

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Art reviews, news and announcements from Edward Goldman. Primary Format : Arts Also Listed as: Art Arts NPR Public Radio City : Santa Monica State/Province : CA Country : USA Country : NA User Tags: User Votes: RSS Feed Website People found this Podcast Searching for: War | Car talk | Talk | NPR | Art Talk | View this Podcast on a Google Map. Add to iTunes Text Only listing of KCRW's Art Talk Podcasts Trumix.com listings available of KCRW's Art Talk Podcasts Click Here to Update the directory of this podcasts programs.

Trumix.com listings available of KCRW's Art Talk Podcasts Build your own playlists with this podcast. A New Madonna for Our City of Angels So, ladies and gentlemen, if you, like me, have been procrastinating on filing your taxes until the very last moment, then today --- April 15 --- is your Atonement Day. Why this Christian reference. Probably it has something to do with the deep impression left on me by the spectacular works by Anselm Kiefer and their religious symbology that I talked about last week. Or, maybe I was swayed by the purity and beauty of the Madonna, not the one on the cover of Vanity Fair, but the 500 year-ol ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website My Thoughts on Madonna, Moses, and...Anselm Kiefer For me, last weekend turned out to be anything but usual. It's Saturday: I am drinking my morning coffee and, all of a sudden, I am in the presence of...Madonna, staring at me from the cover of Vanity Fair. Still in great shape, still eager to provoke. Behind her, the globe that she holds ---- or should I say, clutches ---- with rather frightening determination. Then, another sip of coffee, and a quick look at another cover story: Moses and his famously thunderous voice is no more; Charlto ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Museums and Private Collectors: It Takes Two to Tango My fellow Angelenos, judging by the numerous exhibitions of contemporary art currently on display in various Los Angeles museums, I want to assure you that the state of art in our city is strong... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Art, Sex and Videotape As far as the Los Angeles art scene is concerned, last week was a winner. Consider this: in celebration of its tenth anniversary, the Getty Center held two special conferences. The first was focused on new acquisitions made by Weston Naef, Curator of Photographs, Lee Hendrix, Curator of Drawings, and Thomas Kren, Curator of Medieval Manuscripts. All three curators are old pros who have been with the Getty for decades and have virtually built these collections from the ground up. Each drew ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Color of Life We are lucky to have here, in southern California, some of the best art schools in the country. But when several years ago, I went to one of them to see an exhibition of works by students graduating from the Master of Fine Arts program, I left the galleries feeling rather depressed. Most of the art was inept, and I felt sorry for the parents who had been duped into investing thousands of dollars in their kids' education, with such a dismal return... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Artists as Magicians and Holy Fools In the heady art scene of the 1980's, with New York as its epicenter, there were several brash, young artists who ruled the day. Their paintings were big, their personalities even bigger. Julian Schnabel, David Salle, Eric Fischl, Robert Longo -- they all had become part of the fashionable crowd, their names constantly in the news. Now, a quarter of a century later, their presence on the contemporary art scene is, to put it mildly, rather modest. Today only Julian Schnabel, whose reputatio ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website To Love It All There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that artists cannot make good art from, including such strange substances as bodily fluids and excrement, both animal and human. You may remember the controversy surrounding the paintings by Chris Ofili, the British artist whose trademark material is elephant dung. Bull's urine was used in the past to produce a particular yellow paint, famous for its warm, golden glow. Andy Warhol made a series of so-called 'piss paintings,' where he and his assistants ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Idiots Retreat Idiots Retreat Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website What a Shame Every time I see an artwork appear on the front page of the newspapers, my heart sinks, because I know: the news, most of the time, is not good. Today's headlines announce the brazen theft of four priceless works from a private museum in Zurich, Switzerland... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Oscars, Hollywood and Art This morning, when the Academy announced the Oscar nominations, all other front-page news ---- the stock prices plunging, the gas prices rising ---- seemed less important to me. Hey, after all, I live in LA, in close proximity to the gods and goddesses of Hollywood who, for almost a hundred years, have kept us enthralled in dark theaters across the world. They are the objects of our worship, inspiration, gossip, and ridicule. I can't resist quoting Frank Sinatra: "Call me irresponsible... ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Who Calls the Shots at LACMA. Who Calls the Shots at LACMA. Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website I Wanna Wish You an 'Artsy' Christmas What would A Christmas Day Art Talk be without Mr. Scrooge. His latest misdeed is a royal screw-up of a major cultural exchange between Russia and Great Britain. A few weeks before the opening in London of a blockbuster exhibition from the Hermitage and three other major museums, the Russians called it off... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Photos to Intimidate and Fall in Love With There are a number of reasons why the remarkable photographs by Graciela Iturbide probably would not be used in an advertising campaign to lure tourists to Mexico. She works primarily in black and white, and neither the landscapes nor the people in her work appear to be particularly genteel.  On the contrary, her powerful images tend to rattle and put you on guard, as if you had stumbled into a not yet explored physical and emotional territory connected to the ancient past... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Very Good and Irresistably Kitschy Surrender was the only option I had upon entering the festive photo installation by Jenny Okun at Craig Krull Gallery in Bergamot Station. Close to two hundred photographs cover the walls salon-style, from floor to ceiling, creating an enchanting visual equivalent of a merry-go-round. Most of the compositions are comprised of overlapping images of architectural and sculptural monuments, which the artist reassembles into dynamic and whimsical narratives. For my money, this is the jolliest ex ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website China on My Mind It's been more than three weeks since I returned from Beijing, but thoughts and impressions of it resurface on a daily basis. Friends and colleagues keep asking all sorts of questions about China, as if I had become an expert on the subject after being there for only nine days; but certainly, I did my best to keep my eyes, ears, and mind open as wide as possible. These days, the coverage of the Chinese contemporary art scene has spilled over from the pages of art magazines to such mainstrea ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Artists That Slash, Crash and Cuddle If you've seen Gordon Matta-Clark's artwork ---- even once ---- you will remember the rush of adrenaline it sends through your veins. After all, this is an artist who loved to display the results of violence he perpetrated habitually against the objects of his desire. Think of all the gory scenes from Hollywood movies: knives plunging, bodies falling in slow motion... That's exactly what Gordon Matta-Clark did to abandoned buildings ---- carving huge holes in their walls or slashing them wi ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Chinese Lessons Though the invitation to travel to Beijing came up only a couple of months ago, I was preparing myself for this trip --- without even realizing it --- for almost a year... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Art Explosion Inside Chinese Munitions Factory Eight days in Beijing.-- Never been in Asia before.-- It's my first trip to China.-- Always felt slightly intimidated by the huge span of its history, by the intricacy and "otherness" of its culture.-- But here I am, among several dozen journalists from around the world, invited for the opening of the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, an ambitious and impressive undertaking, privately funded by Belgian collectors Guy and Myriam Ullens.... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website British, German and Japanese Art Come to LA, Edward Goes to China What a difference a week makes...---- seven times 24 little hours...---- Santa Ana winds and firestorms once more wrestled to the ground our cherished illusions of our idyllic life in Southern California.-- No doubt, some day, this recurring calamity will become the subject for a great work of art. To my knowledge, it hasn't happened yet... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website You Can Never Be Too Thin, Too Rich or Have Too Many Museums Keeping up with what's happening on the Southern California art scene is not as easy as it used to be.-- In the last 25 years, existing museums have greatly expanded and new museums have opened, while the number of commercial art galleries has jumped from a few dozen to a few hundred. A few weeks ago, I reported on the small, new, fascinating Wende Museum in Culver City, devoted to the history and culture of the Cold War era in Eastern Europe... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Exhibitions That Rock When last year the Pompidou Centre in Paris organized the exhibition celebrating LA art, it was monumental, overwhelming, and slightly tedious in its academic intention to miss nothing, no matter how minor. When last week the Orange County Museum of Art opened its exhibition celebrating California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury, it turned out to be not too big, not too small --- just right in size. With about 150 objects, including paintings, photographs, TV footage, furniture, and ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Art on Film With rare exception, movies about famous painters prove to be a disappointment. The recent film about Gustav Klimt, with the formidable John Malkovich in the title role, was a futile attempt to capture the essence of this artist's life in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century. Though the beautiful costumes and authentic interiors provided a certain pleasure, it was not enough. The film disappeared without a trace. A few years earlier, the abysmal movie about Modigliani starring Andy Garcia ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Week Chock Full of Art September is the month when, after a summer lull, the art world kicks into high gear. And for me, last week turned out to be all art, all the time, virtually a 24/7 art explosion... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Dirty Money, and Plenty of It My dear listeners, I have no doubt that most of you are upstanding citizens with unimpeachable moral standards.-- Therefore, it's with significant trepidation that I must confess to being tempted, and ultimately seduced by, a big bundle of dirty money.-- And if you think that you would be strong enough to resist the temptation, go ahead and try it for yourself.-- There is a place in town where a huge mound of silver coins is waiting for you.-- First you will stare at it in disbelief, then y ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Enigmatic Tales of Lari Pittman and Veronika Kellndorfer Lari Pittman, one of the best known American artists, was born here in LA, studied and became famous here, and continues to live, work, and teach here as well. The list of his exhibitions in the US and abroad is impressively long. Not only were his works included in last year's exhibition at the Pompidou Center in Paris celebrating Los Angeles art, but they were prominently displayed there in a gallery of their own, an honor bestowed upon only a few of the 80-plus participating artists. Thi ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website In Holland, Drunk on Art Three months have passed since my trip to Holland, but I'm still slightly foggy from --- let's be honest --- being overdosed. When I tell people that I stayed in Amsterdam, they knowingly smile and then, with a wink ask, "Did you try the stuff." You bet I did. That's what I went to Holland for...and there was plenty of it. Rembrandt! Frans Hals!! Vermeer!!! And not only in Amsterdam, in the stately Rijksmuseum, but in the Mauritshuis Museum in The Hague and the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website An LA Take on Brazilian and Dutch Design When I met Michael and Gabrielle Boyd for the first time at a museum function a few months ago, I knew immediately who they were, thanks to a recently published article about their collection in the LA Times magazine and a profile on them in Vanity Fair. They live in Santa Monica Canyon, in a house built by the famous Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer -- the only structure he has ever built in the United States... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Treasures from Russia under the California Sun Now that the Getty Museum has wisely chosen to undertake the painful but inevitable step of placating the Italian authorities by sending back to Italy forty antiquities from the museum's collection, it's a good time to reflect on this controversy and try to make sense of it all.-- I couldn't agree more with the editorial page of the Los Angeles Times (August 6, 2007) stating that "Legally, the return of the artworks is the right thing to do...International treaties left Getty executives wit ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website A Presidential Fear of Art Watching the recent Democratic and Republican presidential debates with their tightly choreographed structure and lack of spontaneity, I started to wonder: if I had the chance, what questions would I ask the candidates to steer them away from their scripted responses. For example, what interesting book have they read recently --- and I mean novel, and not the latest presidential biography or memoir... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Summer Sign-Up 2007 Support KCRW's Summer SignUp: (http://www.kcrw.com) Summer Sign-Up 2007 Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Story of Two Exhibitions: One Friendly, The Other Not One of the best kept secrets of LA's downtown art scene is REDCAT, a cutting-edge performance and exhibition space run by CalArts. Don't feel guilty if you haven't been there yet; it's not easy to find, as it's tucked away on the ground floor of Disney Hall, far from the main entrance of this famous building. Since its opening a few years ago, REDCAT has hosted a number of ambitious exhibitions, often presenting challenging conceptual and performance art not necessarily intended for a gener ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Controversy over Monument to Reverend King When it comes to the official monuments decorating city squares in China, Libya, Iraq, and the former Soviet Union, one thing that all these oversized statues of local dictators have in common is the laughably low quality of the art. The infamous bronze statue of Saddam Hussein, toppled in Baghdad after US troops seized the Iraqi capital, is a perfect example of this brand of official art: the inevitable stiffness of pose, obligatory right arm thrust upward toward a bright future, and total ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Sensual Art of Drawing On any given day, Los Angeles teems with well-toned, fresh-faced hopefuls waiting for their big break. You can find them on the beach or if you get lucky, bump into one of them at Schwab's Drugstore on Sunset Blvd. At least that's where, according to legend, a Hollywood agent discovered the divine Lana Turner in the 1930's. If that same agent lived in Paris in the 1880s, I wonder what he would think about the beautiful barmaid at the Folies-Berg--re, the one that --douard Manet immortalized ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website An Exhibition Overdosed on Love Until I found in my mailbox the eye-catching catalog of Mary Heilmann's exhibition at the Orange County Museum of Art, I had never heard of her. The handsomely printed hardcover book, with its elegant layout and numerous color reproductions, is clearly a labor of love. For this California born and raised artist, who now resides in New York, this is the first retrospective covering four decades of her career... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website LA Art through a European Prism Last month, I traveled through about a dozen European cities in just three weeks; it was all art, all the time, but don't feel sorry for me, it was not exactly heavy lifting. The invitation to visit Holland came from two Dutch organizations: the Mondrian Foundation and the Center for International Cultural Activities (SICA).-- My hosts gave me carte blanche: staying in Amsterdam I could travel to other cities and see as many museums and meet as many curators and directors as my heart desire ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Andrea Zittel Kisses the Frog Have you ever tried to imagine the persona of the artist behind the work.-- Their look, their age.-- What kind of personality do they have: outgoing or shy, maybe.-- I have to admit that most of the time when I tried to do that, I failed.-- For example, LA sculptor extraordinaire Tim Hawkinson, whose current exhibition at the Getty Museum is getting rave reviews, almost shocked me when I met him for the first time.-- He was so quiet and unassuming, almost ordinary.-- With his amazingly inve ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Andrea Zittel Kisses the Frog Have you ever tried to imagine the persona of the artist behind the work.-- Their look, their age.-- What kind of personality do they have: outgoing or shy, maybe.-- I have to admit that most of the time when I tried to do that, I failed.-- For example, LA sculptor extraordinaire Tim Hawkinson, whose current exhibition at the Getty Museum is getting rave reviews, almost shocked me when I met him for the first time.-- He was so quiet and unassuming, almost ordinary.-- With his amazingly inve ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Can Mediocre Art Serve a Good Cause. Going to a museum to see a permanent collection or temporary exhibition I expect to see good as well as great artworks inevitably mixed with decidedly lesser ones which are needed to complete the story and illustrate a point of view.-- After all, great and good artworks are by definition in limited supply, while mediocre and merely competent works are always plentiful... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Can Mediocre Art Serve a Good Cause. Going to a museum to see a permanent collection or temporary exhibition I expect to see good as well as great artworks inevitably mixed with decidedly lesser ones which are needed to complete the story and illustrate a point of view.-- After all, great and good artworks are by definition in limited supply, while mediocre and merely competent works are always plentiful... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The New York Times' Love Affair with LA. It took me no time at all to fall in love with Los Angeles -- just a few intakes of the balmy air upon emerging from the plane shortly after midnight.-- Until then, I didn't believe in love at first sight.-- Now, almost thirty years later, I know better.-- Never mind the wonderful climate and suspiciously gorgeous Hollywood wannabes.-- This huge and sprawling metropolis stubbornly refuses to follow the rules of success established by its older rivals, and instead of the storied beauty of Pa ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The New York Times' Love Affair with LA. It took me no time at all to fall in love with Los Angeles -- just a few intakes of the balmy air upon emerging from the plane shortly after midnight.-- Until then, I didn't believe in love at first sight.-- Now, almost thirty years later, I know better.-- Never mind the wonderful climate and suspiciously gorgeous Hollywood wannabes.-- This huge and sprawling metropolis stubbornly refuses to follow the rules of success established by its older rivals, and instead of the storied beauty of Pa ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Our Right to Demand Clean Air and Good Quality Art The enthusiastic response to last week's program about the daring art installation "Stations of the Cross" at San Gabriel's Church of Our Saviour made me think about how much of contemporary art is experienced by us outside of museum and gallery walls.-- The problem is that most of the art we may encounter in restaurants, in hotels, in theatre lobbies or in doctors' offices is rather mediocre, to put it mildly.-- I wonder how all these places would be perceived if the quality of art there w ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Ground Zero and Stations of the Cross A couple of weeks ago a friend of mine called to let me know about a rather unusual exhibition I shouldn't miss.-- It is a little bit off the beaten path, she warned, but you're an adventurous man, aren't you Edward.-- It was a challenge I simply had to take.-- Driving to the San Gabriel Valley turned out to be not such a big deal ---- actually it's not far from Pasadena and San Marino.-- The unusual thing about this conceptual art exhibition was that it was mounted neither in a museum nor ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website The Getty Shows Off Its Monsters Like a monster out of a low-budget Japanese horror movie, it's huge and more than a bit scary.-- Its translucent tentacles are a hundred feet long, and it feels as if they're still growing, ready to ensnare anyone within reach.-- The creature doesn't even have an easily identifiable main body.-- Instead, there are a few gigantic kidney-shaped blobs: translucent, flimsy, icky - like the tentacles that grow out of them.-- I saw it last night with my very own eyes, and I swear I was stone cold ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Oscar Dish of Celebrities and Butterflies It takes chutzpah to roll into LA just a few days before the Oscars and still hope to get some attention for a project not connected to Hollywood -- at least not directly.-- To win this game, ambition is not enough; one needs to be a superstar, propelled by a superagent.-- Damien Hirst, the most famous of the so-called Young British Artists, and Robert Wilson, the much celebrated American avant-garde theater director, stage designer and sculptor, flew in last week to supervise the final pre ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Close-Up on Chuck Close If you've ever been invited to an elegant dinner where every bite is a delight andeach new course makes you hungry all over again, then you want to treat yourself to what amounts to a sumptuous feast for your eyes -- an exhibition of Chuck Close prints at the Orange County Museum of Art... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Four Times Fair Makes Magic. The end of the year has its own inevitable rhythm; the busy holiday season is punctuated with shopping, partying, and obligations to have a good time. And still, many of us can't wait for the quiet weeks of January. Not this year, that's for sure. For a stretch of ten days starting last week and continuing through the upcoming weekend, Los Angeles became the arena for four virtually concurrent Art Fairs competing for our attention.... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website John Constable, Precursor of Modern Art. One cannot blame British artists for their cutthroat politics in fighting for a place in the sun.-- To be noticed by the public and written about by art critics, these chaps would go to remarkable lengths.-- At the end of the day, the Royal Academy and admission into its famous annual Salon was all they dreamed about.-- Even the lucky ones, whose paintings were accepted, were prone to anxiety attacks, wondering: Will their painting be shown in the prestigious Main Gallery or be banished int ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website Great Art, Fake Art... Who Knows. The news about the recent acquisition by the Getty Museum of a rarepainting by Paul Gauguin came as a welcome surprise. Though this workis known to specialists, it has rarely been seen, as its Swiss ownerwas very reluctant to loan it out for exhibitions. Even inreproduction, it is absolutely striking, not only because of thebeautifully preserved colors, but also because of the strangeness ofits subject. Painted by Gauguin during his first trip to Tahiti, itshows what appears to be the sever ... Listen | Listen in your iPhone | Download | View full cache | Visit Website