ART????????

Throw the rule book out

Kissing palm trees turns wrong right,

Conceptual art.

I visited LACMA recently with daughter in

tow, or perhaps more accurately described

she visited LACMA with mom in tow to catch

the waning days of the John Baldessari exhibit,

entitled Pure Beauty. Unlike Phoebe, I had

never heard of this artist, who lived and worked

for many years just down the road a piece in

National City and now has stepped it up to digs

in Santa Monica. He is considered a conceptual

artist which, best I can tell, means he turns art

on its head, questioning its very essence and in

doing so creates art that turns heads. At least it

turned mine. Baldessari has been at it for a

long time (he's nearly 80),pushing the envelope,

looking for relevance,seeking a new way of

speaking to us about us. In 1970, finding

the medium of painting no longer relevant to

him as an artist, he burned all of his works of

art completed between May 1953 and March 1966.

Rising from those ashes came "The Cremation Project",

which turned the act of his destruction into a new work.

Thoughtful, manipulative, deliberate, daring, crazy, a

stroll through this rather extensive and beautifully

laid out exhibit made my brain ache. In a good way.