Monthly Archives: May 2018

RELATIONSHIPS: WHEN STREET ART GETS TOO SEXY

This street artwork of two rabbits in flagrante leaves nothing to the imagination. The relationship between the creatures is raw and natural and strictly an instinctive biological transaction between animals. Rabbits are often depicted as cute and innocent in popular culture. But here they’re engaged in sex, an uncute physical act. It’s rude, but it’s also terribly funny. The indelible graphical image and comic-book style the bunnies are depicted in is in stark contrast to the otherwise utterly forgettable graffiti tags on either side. Find this on a wall next to a vacant lot along Lincoln Blvd. in Venice, Los Angeles. 

HIGH-FLYIN’: 800 VIEWS OF AIRPORT

We — and possibly you, too — are a big fan of large coffee-table art books by the likes of publishers Taschen, Phaidon and Rizzoli, to name but a few. Among our favorite stack of these large tomes is a book by a lesser-known German publisher. It’s a book of photographs by the artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss titled “800 Views of Airports.” And that’s exactly what you get, literally 800 photos taken in airports by the artists over several decades of international air travel. There’s no accompanying text, no explanations, no captions. Just photographs of airports, airplanes, tarmac vehicles, control towers and views looking out of windows from air-terminal boarding lounges around the globe. The book is a mesmerizing document of the airport’s cultural landscape. For those who have traveled widely and often by air, the images in this book may feel in their own way comforting.

VEHICULAR: THE COBRA SNAKE VAN

Wait … what? The Cobra Snake van is parked on ultra-luxe Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, in Los Angeles? Actually we’ve seen the van parked here for the past year. ( Our HQ is a few blocks away in the NOT ultra-luxe part of Santa Monica.) Who knew the Cobra Snake was so bougie?

ARCHITORTURE: ART-DECO MOVIE THEATER MAKES US WONDER IF WE’VE GONE BACK IN TIME

The Aero movie theater on tony Montana Avenue on Santa Monica’s northside is a Los Angeles treasure. A working cinema and a venue for retrospective film events, the Aero is a perfectly intact example of classic art-deco architecture and style. It’s a landmark that at night lights up its marquee and neon lights, a look that harkens back to a bygone era of L.A. and classic Hollywood.

STREETSY: ELECTRICAL UTILITY BOX AS CANVAS

The electrical utility box is a feature of the built-up urban landscape in many U.S. cities. These boxes tend to be rectangular gray objects standing upright on sidewalks and are mostly featureless, neutral occupants of public space. What better a blank canvas is there for street artists to showcase their work, illicit or commissioned. In parts of Los Angeles, especially in the westside neighborhoods of Venice and Mar Vista, it appears almost every utility box is covered with street art or graffiti. The art is often colorful and inoffensive, adding a dash of color to the gray and black hues of the city streets and pavement.

 

DIVINE KIM KARDASHIAN AND SAINT / NORTH

This simple photographic wheat-paste street art in Venice, Los Angeles, depicts Kim Kardashian with, we assume, one of her two children (Saint or North West-Kardashian). In this image, she appears saintly, head wrapped in a manner like the late Mother Teresa. Kardashian may have once seemed an unlikely celebrity and pop-cultural phenom. The reality-TV star initially rose to notoriety on the heels of a leaked homemade sex tape back in the 2000s. Since then she has transcended from her role as TV celeb of dubious talent to an international beauty and fashion icon. She married hip-hop megastar Kanye West and bore her children with him. Recently she has become a vocal advocate for prison reform going so far as to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump to make the case for issuing a pardon on behalf of a convicted drug offender. Her profile is slowly changing. Perhaps motherhood, success, experience and a relentless media presence have led to an awareness of how to wield her influence, her megaphone, for a greater cause.

CONFUSED: LUMBER YARD OR ART MUSEUM?

The answer to the question is  …. art museum, obviously. Specifically the Hammer Museum of Art in Los Angeles. The logs you see pictured here not actually lumber but rather utility poles that for decades stood along the streets of Limassol on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.  When changes in technology rendered these obsolete, the poles were removed. The artist Christodoulos Panayiotou’s acquired these as a kind of readymade, found objects and material for this artwork, titled “Independence Street.”