(Courtesy Simon & Schuster)

It's apparently a big day for items about Los Angeles and food over here at the offices of The New York Observer. This one has both. Tonight at 7:30 p.m. there's going to be a dramatic reading of Rachel Kushner's new book The Flamethrowers in Los Angeles at 356 S. Mission Road, the huge warehouse space that artist Laura Owens is using to show her gigantic and beautiful new paintings and host various events. The readers include Alex Israel, Stanya Kahn and others. There's also a spaghetti dinner!

Everyone seems to agree that The Flamethrowers, which is set in and around the Soho art world of the 1970s is a pretty good book. (My colleague Michael H. Miller profiled Ms. Kushner for The Observer's Spring Arts Preview last month.)

There's more! The organizers write in their e-mail invitation:

Stay after the reading and spaghetti for a screening of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson's hilarious short film "EAST COAST/ WEST COAST

Really wish I was in L.A. right now.

RSVP to rsvp at 356million dot com if you're planning to attend.

Catherine Opie. (Courtesy Walkerartcenter.org)

The Los Angeles Times ran a profile over the weekend of artist Catherine Opie, who has a show of photographs at L.A.'s Regen Projects opening in February. The most interesting bit is her explanation of why she resigned from the artist board at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles last summer along with John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger and Ed Ruscha, amidst the departure of the museum's curator Paul Schimmel.

"The big one for me was not just John [Baldessari] stepping down first — that was a big red flag — but I had just given them a portfolio to sell to save a person's job in education," she says. "And it equaled about $150,000, and literally the next day they let that person go.

"I can't imagine any board member writing a check for $150,000 and having them turn around and let that person whose program you're supporting go. That to me was very insulting," she says.

Ms. Opie continued, explaining that she didn't feel like she had a voice at the museum. She told the Times, "I actually want to participate in having real ideas and real feelings about what a place like MOCA means to this community."

Going to Hollywood. (Courtesy PMC)

Yesterday, the Academy announced its nominations for the Oscars. Exciting news for the world of pop culture, less so perhaps for the art world, which is generally more curious about shows of a different kind—those that will be opening in Los Angeles’s galleries on Oscars weekend.

The most-talked-about exhibition tends to be at Gagosian Gallery, in Beverly Hills. Back in 2008, when Julian Schnabel was on the menu, John Waters characterized the event to The Observer as “Hollywood’s chance to wear black and look at art and pretend they’re New Yorkers,” and the opening dinner tends to be a star-studded affair. (And there's even been a kind of synergy with Hollywood: in 2011, Oscars co-host James Franco showed work at Gagosian.) The Observer has learned what’s on offer this year, and it promises not to disappoint: up this time is new work (including new paintings) by Richard Prince, one of Gagosian’s star artists. Mr. Prince’s last solo exhibition at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills space, in 2005, also in the Oscars slot, was his first with the gallery. Like other of Gagosian’s Oscars-timed exhibitions (think Andreas Gursky in 2010), it augured his joining the Gagosian stable, which he did in 2008. That show was also of major new paintings, in that case his “check paintings,” so called because he had pasted canceled checks onto the canvas.

But Mr. Prince, whose show opens on Feb. 21, won’t be the only game in town. On the following evening, in nearby West Hollywood, Ohwow gallery is debuting new pieces by young artist Nick van Woert in his first solo show with the gallery, called “No Man’s Land.” On the 23rd, Prism Gallery opens a show of Mario Testino—he’s been called “fashion’s favorite photographer,” which should ensure a glitzy crowd—and, on that same night, Regen Projects opens an exhibition of a very different photographer, Catherine Opie, who was in the news over the summer as one of the artists to depart the board of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, over curator Paul Schimmel’s departure. Also exhibiting photography is Perry Rubenstein, with a show of Iwan Baan. Meanwhile, L.A.-based artist Henry Taylor, who had a large one-person show at MoMA PS1 last year, will present work at Blum & Poe.

And that’s just a sampling of L.A.’s rich art offerings that week. Sure, as Mr. Waters put it, Angelenos may take art as an opportunity to make like they’re New Yorkers. But as things continue to heat up on the city’s art scene, New Yorkers might want to book their tickets for Los Angeles.

L.A. (Courtesy Bruce Bennett/Getty Images)

If, like The Observer, you enjoyed the Getty's 2011 Pacific Standard Time initiative, and are looking for an excuse to return to Southern California (love visiting, couldn't live there, as they say!), you are in luck. The Getty announced today that a new project focused on the area's modern architecture, "Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A.," is in the works.

The nine planned exhibitions, which will receive grants from the Getty, will appear at Los Angeles-area museums from April to July 2013. There are a bevy of institutions taking part in the shows and programming. The full list, from the news release reads as follows:

Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA); Hammer Museum; A+D Architecture and Design Museum; Art, Design & Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara; Kellogg University Art Gallery at Cal Poly Pomona; MAK Center for Art and Architecture; and Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). Additional programming partners include the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Community Art Resources, Inc., The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, the Los Angeles Conservancy, Machine Project, Pasadena Heritage, and the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design.

Among the scheduled offerings are "A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture from Southern California" at the Museum of Contemporary Art and "Reconsidering LACMA: Peter Zumthor and the Presence of the Past." (Mr. Zumthor has been retained to redesign LACMA's campus.)

No doubt Ice Cube is looking forward to it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRWatw_ZEQI

'Made in L.A. 2012.' (Courtesy the Hammer Museum)

Los Angeles's Hammer Museum announced that L.A.–based curators Karin Higa and Michael Ned Holte have been selected to curate the sophomore outing of its biennial, "Made in L.A." The first edition of the exhibition closed at the beginning of this month.

Both curators have worked for periods in New York, the Los Angeles Times notes. Ms. Higa—whose photo for the L.A. Times was shot by Sharon Lockhart—first worked as a curator in New York, and curated "One Way or Another: Asian American Art Now" at the Asia Society Museum in 2006. Mr. Holte, who has been published widely as a critic and opted to have Wyatt Troll shoot his portrait, organized the 2007 show "Laying Bricks" at Chelsea's Wallspace gallery.

The New York Times' Carol Vogel also gave the news some space in her Inside Art column, quoting the Hammer's director, Ann Philbin, saying that this year's show yielded twice the attendance of the show it replaced, an annual showcase of work by the city's artists. “It’s all about packaging something in a way that gets people excited," she told Ms. Vogel.

As for our great city's homegrown biennial, the Whitney Biennial, there's as of yet no word on who will curate the 2014 edition.

L.A. MOCA. (Courtesy Chris and/or Kevin/Flickr)

In a major reversal, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art's board announced that the institution will hire a chief curator to replace Paul Schimmel, who departed from the museum in June. Previously, the museum had not planned to replace Mr. Schimmel, instead using guest curators to augment its existing curatorial staff when organizing shows. Bloomberg's Christopher Palmeri broke the news, and has a letter from the museum's board in which it acknowledges the criticism that it has faced in recent weeks.

Kubrick in 1975. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Los Angeles County Museum of Art has announced today the dates and honorees for its 2012 "Art + Film Gala." The event will take place Oct. 27 and will honor artist Ed Ruscha and director Stanley Kubrick, with Steven Spielberg paying tribute to the late filmmaker.

This is the second year of the gala. It is co-chaired by Leonardo DiCaprio and LACMA trustee Eva Chow.

Aged roughly 9 to 12, the tween—as an emergent subject and object of exploitation—is the jump-off point for the exhibition “Too Old for Toys, Too Young for Boys,” organized by New York-based curator Alex Gartenfeld at the Los Angeles gallery Ohwow, which opened June 30 and runs through September 1.

“Because the teenager is a historical convention, I was hoping to get beyond it," Mr. Gartenfeld told Gallerist via e-mail. “The tween seemed so much more honest because it’s a demographic created explicitly for commercial exploitation.”

The show, which brings together 14 works by a variety of contemporary artists, was inspired by two texts, Charlie White’s “Minor Threat” and Seth Price’s “Teen Image,” which both deal with the way artists have “predicted, responded to or critiqued developments in popular imagery,” in the words of Mr. Gartenfeld.

Some of the works instill a similar duality of creepy exploitation coupled with the defiant confidence of the tween invoked by Mr. Prince's piece. In one photograph by Aura Rosenberg (she asked adult artists and children to collaborate on portraits) a young shirtless boy's innocence is undercut by his tough look and the odd lines drawn on his face, which seem to reference scars or the kind of lines a plastic surgeon might draw on the skin of a face-lift patient.

But not all of the works involve tweens directly. Josh Kline’s mock-ups of images of adult celebrities are equally eerie and evocative. There are also sculptures and abstract paintings. Donald Moffett’s painting, which through its creation—by the repetitive mechanical application of paint, mimics the kind of accumulation and information gathering peculiar to the Internet.

While there is an undercurrent of celebrity in the show, it’s not a theme per se (“'celebrity' as a theme in art is not at all useful,” he noted) but there is an uneasy connection between tweens and celebrity in the exploration of image creation and consumption.

“A very small number of tweens are celebrities,” said Mr. Gartenfeld. “Tweens are people who are generally quite adept with social media and who are themselves consuming a lot of celebrity content. It’s interesting to think about the permutations of subject-object/subject-subject relationships (child-child, child-adult, adult-child) when it comes to 'tween'-specific imagery. Technology affords these relationships a thrilling, oscillating proximity.”

A painting from the series. (Courtesy Wikipaintings)

The Los Angeles Times reports that the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens has just finalized plans to buy a Robert Rauschenberg Spread painting from 1979.

The institution purchased the work from Gagosian gallery. From the story:

Though not considered as important as his "Combine" assemblages from the 1950s and '60s, which radically introduced the detritus of everyday life into art, the later Spread series has some classic Rauschenberg touches: the incorporation of found objects (in this case, smashed glue brushes) along with painted surfaces (here, acrylic), the use of photo-transfer techniques, and the inclusion of newsprint to signal or simulate the texture of daily life.

More details here.

(Courtesy PMC)

Here is a video, courtesy of Pitchfork, of the Beastie Boys' Mike D giving a tour of the show he curated at LA MOCA. It seems worthwhile to mention his own cautionary words on the video: "I would say, matter-of-factly, that a Youtube clip does not do this justice." Still, it all looks pretty great to us. Have a look for yourself.