Plastic Passion

Oh, Andy Warhol. I love you and your art to death, and you did an amazing job of prophesizing the whole Internet/Cobrasnake/Shadowscene/Last Night's Party micro-celebrity culture; you really did. But you've got this one infamous quote that just refuses to go away:

I love L.A. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic -- but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.

Talk about your backhanded compliments. Sheesh. And it's so frustrating coming from a guy completely obsessed with self-reinvention and image, who hung out with Bianca Jagger and Liza Minelli and the rest of the ultra-fabulous at Studio 54, who had a coterie of gender-benders surrounding him at all times, who infamously dyed his hair silver and wore wigs.

All this is fine. It's fantastic! If I could go back in time and visit any era, it would be to go hang at the Factory and watch the Velvet Underground with you and Edie and Candy and Joe and Ultra. But don't act as if all this is fine and dandy and hip and superstar when in New York, but the exact same behavior is plastic when in Los Angeles. Dig?

(Here's where I would have posted a YouTube link to E-I-E-I-O's "Andy Warhol's Dead But I'm Not," but it's not on there. I thought perhaps it got caught up in the Warners boycott, but now I realize I'm probably the only person who remembers that song, even among the entire YouTube nation.)

Assholes on YouTube

Here we go. See what I'm over here griping about? I only wish I could view the full-length videos to some of these:



But despite all the videos I've embedded on this blog so far, not every Los Angeles reference on YouTube is stereotyping -- some are in fact quite the opposite. Take this, for example:



And people say Los Angeles has no art community.

Burn This

Is it me, or is it getting hot in here? Gary Simmons is a visual artist with a new show in West Hollywood featuring renditions of Los Angeles landmarks on fire: the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, the Hollywood sign, etc. Here's part of it:

Combine this with the last post about the film Burning Palms, which isn't a film about a fire or anything, but is titled to quickly connote Los Angeles, and it looks like we've got anther cliche on our hands: that Los Angeles is burning. Bad Religion certainly believe it is:

And Public Enemy would like it to be:



I mean, come on, Gary Simmons. These paintings do look kinda neat, made out of paint and wax, but is there really, truly a statement here or are you just dittoing yet another sad old Los Angeles cliche? The LA Times kindly points us to this Ed Ruscha painting, Los Angeles County Museum on Fire, from way back in 1968:

They also reference Day of the Locust and Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, which "inspired" the collection (okay, I admittedly haven't seen that one, but I'll trust that Los Angeles burns in it), so the Times isn't buying this as an original idea either. So what kind of person would be so fixated on hating Los Angeles to spend a significant portion of his life's work replicating a tired anti-LA trope/fantasy of destruction?

Gary Simmons lives and works in New York City. He graduated from the School of Visual Arts in 1988 and went on to receive an MA from Cal Arts in 1990. The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York organized a mid-career survey in 2003 that traveled to the MCA, Chicago and Site Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 2006, Simmons' work was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Bohen Foundation, New York.

Oh, got it.

Ricky-Rolled

Ricky Gervais is promoting his new film in the pages of this week's Time by walking around the Getty Museum with a reporter and commenting on the activities there:

Now he and his girlfriend, whom he met in college, live in London and have bought a second home on Manhattan's Upper East Side because it's close to the museums. At 47, he still has the impishness of someone who unexpectedly made it.
When he spots a sign pointing upstairs to paintings, the L.A.-ness of it cracks him up. "Paintings! That's great. They have to be very specific. Like 'Things Made of Clay.'..."

Okay, I've obviously seen many generalizations of this city or I wouldn't be here. But this is certainly the first time someone's dissed us for a sign directing people to paintings within a museum. I know, he's saying all paintings can't be generalized into one broad category, blah, blah, but come on. Would he walk into Amoeba Records and complain that a sign points people toward the "vinyl"? A department store with a floor dedicated to "menswear"?

Of course not. But you see, this is Los Angeles, where a somewhat non-specific sign isn't simply helping museum visitors get where they need to go. In this case, it's a reflection on our supposed lack of culture: Look how shallow we are! We think all paintings are alike! We just want to look at whatever pretty colors are placed before us!

All right, Ricky, feel free to stereotype however you want, but the Getty is still the fourth top museum in the world (ranked higher than anything in London, incidentally), and Ghost Town still looks awful.