Yesterday, I went to LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) with my hubby and my best friend FF. Truth be told, I have not been to LACMA in over 10 years and I felt a bit embarrassed about it, since I do consider myself a member of the artist community.
The first exhibit we saw was the special exhibit in the Art of the Americas Building called “Phantom Sightings: art after the Chicano movement.” I really did not like it. I didn’t feel that the art in that exhibit was a good representation of contemporary art by people of Latin descent. If this is the best collection of this generation’s contemporary Latin artists, and I believe there are a lot of other artists out there that are better, then I feel that I didn’t miss much by not visiting LACMA in 10 years.
Most of the pieces looked like they were just put together in a matter of minutes and lacked any originality or creativity. There were couple of interesting pieces there but as a whole, I felt the collection was a waste of my beautiful afternoon.
Then we moved on to the “Doctrinal Nourishment:Art and Anarchism in the Time of James Ensor” exhibit, which was fantastic. The technique these artists possessed to produce such prints were amazing. Most of the pieces were black and white etchings and some of the pieces were in color by adding watercolor and chalk. To create such pieces one must have had to plan everything and paid attention to the most minuscule detail. It was a great experience to see these pieces in person.
If you can make a trip to LACMA, you should head over there before July 6, 2008, when Ensor exhibit comes to an end.
Later in the evening I read two articles on the internet about the following art exhibits. One was an article on BBC news about seven German artists living with lice in a museum for three weeks in the name of Art, and the other was about an ‘artist’ Guillermo Vargas Habacuc, who took a dog from the street, tied him to a rope in an art gallery and began starving him to death in the name of art. Are artists so out of creative ideas they need help from lice and need to kill an innocent animal? If so, then shouldn’t they get a real job?
Is this really art? If it is I am not so embarrassed for not being part of it for the last 10 years.
