Tom Teicholz

With the holidays imminent, whether due to the spirit of the season or the constant barrage of advertising and emails, one’s thoughts turn to gift-giving – for others and, even, for oneself.
Many gifts are easily consumable or disposable or subject to the whims of trends or fashions. However, there is one gift that in my experience continues to give pleasure, and that is the gift of a great image – a photograph that is a work of art, that imparts beauty and meaning to the beholder.
I mention ...

Netflix’s just-released documentary The Devil Next Door is a true crime mystery about John Demjanjuk, a Cleveland autoworker who was discovered to be a Nazi death camp guard and was tried over a 40-year period in the United States, Israel and Germany in a roller-coaster of convictions and appeals—as he denied any and all participation and guilt. Demjanjuk died in a German nursing home, in 2012, age 91, awaiting the appeal of his German conviction.
As someone who covered Demjanjuk’s Israeli tr...

It is hard to believe that twelve years have passed since the death of R. B. Kitaj, the at-times-controversial artist who coined the term “The London School” about his fellow contemporary artists in Britain (including Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach) and who spent his last years living in Los Angeles. A new exhibition at LA Louver gallery in Venice, CA, “R.B. Kitaj: Collages and Prints, 1964-1975” reminds us of Kitaj’s great talent and his restless, obsessive intelligence expressed in works t...

The work of Ed and Nancy Kienholz is mostly junk. Junk assembled to reveal the dark secrets of the American soul – our violence, our racism, our addiction to the screens that haunt us. Assembled from the detritus of the modern world , their work is deeply political and, in some instances, deeply disturbing. Other times, their works show a mordant humor.
If you have never seen their work, or even if you have, you need to go to LA Louver in Venice to see the installation of “The Merry-Go-World ...

Glenn O’Brien was an artist, a filmmaker, a musician, editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine, a columnist for Interview, Paper, ArtForum and other publications, and a very successful advertising copywriter and creative director of advertising for Barneys Department Store. For much of his adult life he stood at the cusp of contemporary culture, at the vanishing point of cool.
As a contributing writer at Interview during the 1980s Warhol era, I met O’Brien on several occasions and attended ...

There are some tourist experiences that need doing, such as walking the Sydney Harbour Bridge or going up the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building. And when in St, Louis, you’ve got to go up in the Arch, America’s tallest man-made monument, a catenary curve 630 feet up in the air, as wide as it is high.
Truth to tell, I’d gone to the top of the Gateway arch almost thirty years ago. All I really recall is being seated in a capsule that made me feel like Laika, the dog sent into space by t...

Marciano Museum closes

Los Angeles’ Marciano Art Foundation, the three-year-old art museum founded by Marciano brothers, Paul and Maurice—who made their fortune in the jeans business—has unceremoniously closed.
Paul and Maurice Marciano came to Los Angeles in 1981 from France and founded a denim company that eventually became the very successful GUESS? clothing and lifestyle brand. According to the Museum’s website, around that time the brothers started collecting contemporary art. In 2012 the brothers established ...

This past Sunday October, 27, 2019 Carl Bernstein delivered the inaugural Nick Beck Investigative Journalism Lecture at Los Angeles City College (LACC), telling a standing-room-only crowd that journalism is how we “arrive at the best obtainable version of the truth.”
Bernstein, celebrated for breaking the Watergate scandal with Bob Woodward as a young reporter at the Washington Post (and portrayed by Dustin Hoffman in the movie “All The President’s Men,” have since served as Washington Bureau...

At the Music Center in Los Angeles, The Mariinsky Ballet of St. Petersburg performed George Balanchine’s “Jewels.”
In a very informative pre-performance lecture at the Music Center, journalist and dance historian Elizabeth Kaye explained that Georges Balanchine, born Georgiy Balanchivadze in St. Petersburg to Georgian parents, studied at the Imperial Ballet before joining the Mariinsky (the Soviet incarnation of the Imperial Ballet) where at a young age he began choreographing ballets. In 192...

Amy Sherald’s show at Hauser & Wirth in New Yorkwhich I regret to say will close October 26th, is a joy to behold and a revelation. Go see it, if you still can!
Sherald is perhaps best known for her portrait of Michele Obama which can be seen at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. In that portrait, Sherald invests an authority and a greatness that becomes Obama. So much so that Parker Curry, an African-American toddler, gazing up at the portrait at the Museum broke the internet and has n...

This Sunday October 27th, “Almost Famous,” the Musical based on the 2000 Cameron Crowe movie will end its run at the Old Globe Theater in San Diego. Tickets for the run have been sold out for a while but I was lucky enough to attend a matinee recently, and am here to report that when “Almost Famous” turns up on Broadway or in your town (and I’d be shocked if it doesn’t), you and your family will very much enjoy it.
“Almost Famous” as a musical seems like a no-brainer but it is anything but, a...

Recently, I went to an art opening in Santa Monica, where a doorman stood guard, clipboard in hand like at some private party or club. A spiral staircase led to a basement gallery where new works by David Van Eyssen were on display that combined film and still images layered upon each other and interacting in various ways, projected on screens or shown on flat screen TVs.
At times, there were video images that unfolded in a loop and appeared among the still images – sometimes they appeared th...