Your Social Life

This week will be a happy one, my friends, let me tell you. First of all, Amir Zaki and John Divola both open at LAXart. Two immense smart photographs united in the same space, what's not to like? 6 to 9 PM on Saturday.


Same evening , at Regen Projects is the opening of the Walead Beshty-curated Summer Show, and it's chock-full of artists I really love, Pictures Industry (Goodbye to all that): anybody from Carol Bove, Troy Brauntuch, Tony Conrad, De Rijke & de Rooij, Wade Guyton, Imi Knoebel, Glenn Ligon, Michael Snow, etc.  From 6 to 8 on Saturday.

In Chinatown, China Art Objects and Tom Solomon unite forces for a Summer group show at Cottage Home where FBC!'s favorite emerging artist, Juan Capistran, is included, another good reason to go see it, not even mentioning Analia Saban is alo in it, as well as Alex Israel and Jonathan Pylypchuck. Also 6 to 9 on Saturday.


And, if you think you don't have enough "6 to 9 opening on Saturday, my freaking God why haven't they invented teleportation yet????", there's also Kory Newkirk, except it is 6 to 8 PM, almost guarantying yours truly will be unable to attend, but it is conveniently located smack in the middle of LA, at Country Club on 805 South Genesee. Country Club is a gallery that has, IMHO, an editorial problem, since they show fab artists such as Newkirk, as well as lame-duck crap such as Shepard Fairey, Harmony Korine, etc.
Seriously people, if you need to show commercial stuff, so be it, but it's detrimental to your image and to the other, good artists you are showing. A bit more intellectual rigor would be welcome. Unless you have a secret plan to join the Jeffrey Deitch team at MOCA, who knows.

Speaking of which, congratulations to OCMA for taking over the Philip Kaiser-curated Jack Goldstein retrospective from MOCA, a formerly respectable institution that lost its mojo since NYC sent us its own commercial rejects. THE exhibition everybody in Los Angeles has been waiting for a decade, and it's been scrapped for... James Franco? Dennis Hopper bland photographs and mediocre paintings? People, flock see the Arshile Gorky show at MOCA, because it is the very last good exhibition there for a long, long time.


After this rant, let's congratulate also LACMA with the opening next week of the Thomas Eakins, Catherine Opie and Tad Beck trifecta. Super intelligent exhibition. If LACMA folks are reading me, I also wanted to tel you: I love you, but your Twitter feed during "Cell Phone Stories"? Painful. I had to un-follow you a couple of times to clean up my feed. Please, don't do horrible things like this again.