![\"Calder\"](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/Calder.jpeg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nBut the show made a quietly persuasive case for Calder who still has new things to tell us. Seeing a few dozens of his sculptures in the same place, with the right lighting (the museum\u2019s skylights were covered up), and with curving gray walls that complemented the graceful arcs of Calder\u2019s pieces, it was hard not to notice his ingenuity and profundity. Often, he\u2019s able to give each sculpture enormous personality with only a few shapes and two or three colors. He\u2019s coming out of Mondrian in some of his work, but it still feels distinctive.<\/p>\n
The exhibition design \u2013 among the best I\u2019ve ever seen \u2013 was by Frank Gehry. In its more modest way, the exhibit made me rethink Calder the same way John Baldessari\u2019s design for Magritte did a few years ago.<\/p>\n
Christopher Knight, the LA Times\u2019 art critic, was similarly impressed in his review<\/a>, comparing the work to Einstein. He\u2019s struck by:<\/p>\n an aspect of Calder’s work that, to me at least, had never been evident before. Motion doesn’t really describe it. Instead, this is sculpture whose enduring fascination rides on the articulation of the curvature of space through time.<\/i> It does so with elegance and grace. Or, one might say, with the simplicity and profundity of E=mc\u00b2.<\/i><\/p>\n The LACMA also currently has on exhibit a delightful short film by David Hockney \u2013 The Jugglers<\/i>. I\u2019ve found some of Hockney\u2019s work repetitive \u2013 you get to see a lot of it here in LA \u2013 but this piece is fresh and surprising, with its overlapping points of view. I\u2019m a sucker for photography shows, and the exhibition (from the museum\u2019s Vernon collection) See the Light<\/i>, reminded me why. Taking my 7-year-old son through the show and trying to describe how a photographer can make a subjective, personal work while looking outward at nature or society gave the visit extra pleasure.<\/p>\n ALSO: During my two years covering books and authors for the LA Timers, I got all too familiar writing the obituaries of independent bookstores, places that I consider as crucial for culture as museums or concert halls.<\/p>\n Part of what killed the places I wrote about was the domination of superstores. Now the superstores are dying themselves \u2013 Borders is history, Barnes & Noble has begun closing stores, including one in Pasadena. The digital Nook was supposed to save them, and now the company\u2019s Nook division has seen almost 100 layoffs. The New York Times has the story<\/a>.<\/p>\n FINALLY: Since the early \u201890s, when I discovered The Baffler, I\u2019ve been a fan of political writer Thomas Frank, a throwback to old-school social critics like Vance Packard whose thinking has only become sharper and more pertinent since then. His work on inequality and the destruction of the idea of the public may not seem to connect to my blog\u2019s mission to document the changing fortunes of the creative class and the life of culture, but they\u2019re all related. Artists, writers, musicians and others often live in denial, but they are caught in the ugly squeeze as the rest of the middle class.<\/p>\n
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