If a roadside sign said: VISIT OUR GIFT SHOP-- we had to visit it, had to buy its Indian curios, dolls, copper jewelry, cactus candy. The words "novelties and souvenirs" simply entranced her by their trochaic lilt. If some café proclaimed Icecold Drinks [sic], she was automatically stirred, although all drinks everywhere were ice-cold. She it was to whom ads were dedicated: the ideal consumer, the subject and object of every foul poster. --Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

n her official CBC online bio awhile back, broadcaster Sook-Yin Lee declared "art saved my life" as she was growing up. I've always thought that is an amazing, poignant sentiment. I'm not nearly as eloquent as Lee, but I can certainly relate to her story. These days, I have to admit that my interest in this sphere of my life, like many other adolescent passions, is waning somewhat, but there are still some interesting stuff out there worth checking out. Strangely after years of living in Berkeley, my adolescent art fag days seem to be winding down. I don't feel a pressing need to express myself artistically (whatever that means) as much as I used to, partly because I don't feel too much of anything anymore. Perhaps too much stimuli? At the same time, I'm increasingly unmoved by the artistic expressions of others. However, some artists you never get tired of. Anyway, the following sites are simply places I like to visit occasionally, either virtually or physically. (I use this page often to just check out hours of operation.) Whether or not they are truly worthy of artistic merit is yours to judge. Last but not least, be sure to drop by the architecture and design page (which includes my sources of inspiration), the film page, and the media page if you haven't already.

• Ai Weiwei, official site.
• Josef Albers, official site.
• Laurie Anderson works in many mediums. I'll eventually separate performing artists from visual ones when I get enough entries for either of those categories. However, Laurie here can definitely belong to both.
• Larry Bell works in so many mediums, but his installations are the ones that I'm floored by.
• Christo, the couple artists also known as Christo Vladimirov Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude.
• Richard Diebenkorn once lived in Berkeley.
• Olafur Eliasson designs sublime spaces for sensation and pleasure.
• Dan Flavin. During his lifetime, he had accomplished a minor miracle; he made flourescent lights sources of beauty. Usually they make rooms and people unbearably ugly. Who would've thought flourescent lights can be so alluring? Peter Schjeldahl of the New Yorker once wrote, "The experience of being literally illuminated by Flavin's cannily arrayed, perfectly scaled fluorescent fixtures can have emotional consequences that seem preposterously out of proportion to their matter-of-fact cause." From a separate gallery note in the New Yorker, the magazine wrote, "Despite the innate austerity of the work, its palatte-- determined strictly by commercial availability-- bathes the gallery in a rosy glow that somehow brings to mind the fact that Flavin studied briefly with Abstract Expressionist Hans Hoffman. Forget the Caribbean getaway, no tropical sunset could top this." And speaking of getaways, when you're out in the Hamptons, you can stop by the Dan Flavin Art Institute.
• Andreas Gursky.
• Damien Hirst, official site.
• Thomas Heatherwick, official site.
• Edward Hopper. It's amazing how he was able to pack so much emotion into what are ostensibly empty and sterile spaces with almost incidental, distant human figures.
• Donald Judd has a whole town to himself.
• Miranda July manages to express herself and convey her ideas quite effectively over multiple forms of media.
• Anish Kapoor.
• Ellsworth Kelly makes me happy.
• Anselm Kiefer.
• Paul Klee.
• Yves Klein was the pre-eminent muse of Peter Saville in the mid 1980s, and his works really show it. By the way, this is quite a beautiful site.
• Robert Lepage slays your faves by doing everything you wish you could and a whole lot more as an visual multimedia artist, film and stage director, playwright, and actor.
• Rene Magritte. While not nearly half as popular in dorm room walls as Monet, he does get a well-designed gallery of his own by Virtuo.
• Agnes Martin.
• Piet Mondrian. Why is he so great? To start, I'll let our inimitable unofficial resident art interpretor Peter Schjeldahl provide some insight, made while he was trying to convey the genius of one of his masterpieces in MoMA, in the 21 October 2019 issue of the New Yorker:
  
  How did Mondrian do it? And what is it, exactly, and how does whatever that may be matter? The fifty-inch-square canvas presents rectangular blocks and little squares of red, yellow, and blue paint in and across asymmetrically gridded horizontal and vertical bands, against an off-white ground. Boogie-woogie is apt, like the left and right hands at a piano seeming to ignore each other but generating intricate, exuberant rhythmic agreements... The term "abstract" feels too dry—the painting is so concretely active and urgently optimistic. It motors along as you look, engaging your attention in hops, skips, and jumps. The excruciatingly hard work that’s evident (try to imagine any detail scaled, placed, or coloured differently) bespeaks a conviction so compelling that your heart pledges allegiance to it without your mind having any clear idea of what that involves. Call the value utopian modernity. Call it anything. Only luxuriate in the good luck of having eyes to see with and a body that responds to bopping suggestion. Broadway Boogie-Woogie, by a starchy Dutchman enamored of the foxtrot and ideal democracy, feels foundational, as if nothing in the world quite eludes its gravitational tug. The excitement fades from the mind as you turn away—it’s only art—but the experience leaves a moral residue of the strivingly good and true.
  
  Incidentally, the great Mondrimat is a fun interactive site where you can be like Piet.
• Barnett Newman is featured in an extensive exhibit organised by the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A closer inspection of his ostensibly inert and innocuous, but still monomaniacal straight lines drawn across, laid under, or scored into the foundations of paint of his canvases actually dynamics at work. Stare at them for a while, and they become floating, throbbing entities that may even suggest their directions and velocities. I will yet again defer to the almighty New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl to articulate Newman's strange appeal:
  
  The more you try to see [his work] as plain design, the more overwhelmed you are by its irrepressible ambiguity... Those paintings rely on brilliantly simple ideas for turning pictorial space inside out by confronting the beholder with the sheer physicality of the canvas... Newman's style is an august prose. Its musically sequenced zips present one-to-one correspondences with the viewer's body. Their mysterious poise, which recall the attenuated figures of Giacometti, invades and displaces our sense of ourselves, and the effect is a brief but intense experience that begs to be called the sublime: loss of selfhood to something bigger and nobler than we are.


• Yoko Ono, official. I reckon that I may be of the generation (which may yet to be actualised), who consider her to be more influential in the arts, perhaps even in music, than her famous husband. While I may be a Beatles fanatic just like every other person, I consider her work, in a wide variety of media, to be certainly more thought-provoking and intriguing. Confession: one of my most embarrassing moments in life happened when she graciously autographed my LA Festival John Cage programme in 1987. I commented that I didn't realise that she was also a John Cage fan (she was hanging out with him after the concert). She just smiled and said "of course." I was 14 and did not know any better.
• Robert Rauschenberg, official site.
• Ad Reinhardt.
• Gerhard Richter, official site.
• Rembrandt van Rijn.
• James Rosenquist, the artist who makes evocative American pop statements, also has this official site.
• Mark Rothko described himself as the "supreme pessimist," but his work always moves me toward a higher, perhaps more spiritual, plane. The New Yorker critic John Lahr once wrote that his art "demanded surrender to the physical sensation of color."
• Robert Ryman. I'm often drawn to works that blur between painting and installation. This blur often leads to questioning of what is the value of represenation, and ultimately, of art. Our personal favourite art critic Peter Schjeldahl writes in December 2015:
  
  [Ryman's Dia:Chelsea exhibition] offers a tacit reproach to today’s art-world circus. Ryman, now eighty-five, has been making all-white abstract paintings, in square formats of different sizes, for most of the past six decades. He appeals more to cognoscenti than to popular audiences, but no museum collection of painting since the nineteen-sixties can be authoritative without an example of his work. His art’s phlegmatic allure involves qualities of different paint mediums, applied dead smooth or textured by brushstrokes, on canvas, board, paper, aluminum, and other surfaces. At times, the main—or, really, only—event is an emphasis on the way a work is attached to a wall: by bolts, staples, brackets, or flanges. Always, Ryman invites contemplation of the light that falls on his paintings and of their formal relation to the rooms that contain them. There’s no savoring of style, just stark presentation. His work’s economy and quietness may be pleasing, but its chief attraction is philosophical. What is a painting? Are there values inherent in the medium’s fundamental givens—paint skin, support surface, wall—when they are denied traditional decorative and illustrative functions? Such questions absorb Ryman. Do they excite you? Your answer might betray how old you are... It's a kind of mute art that, generating reverent and brainy chatter, puts uninitiated citizens in mind of the emperor’s new clothes. Yet, actually, the populist fable rather befits the serious aims of Ryman and his avant-garde generation, who insisted on something very like full-frontal nudity in artistic intentions. The emperor—roughly, high-modernist faith in art’s world-changing mission—could retain fealty only if stripped of fancy styles and sentimental excuses. That was Ryman’s formative moment. It was succeeded by a suspicion, now amounting to a resigned conviction, that contemporary art is an industry producing just clothes, with no ruling authority inside them.



• Joseph Mallord William Turner was the Romantic, proto-impressionist whose ostensibly monomaniacal explorations in light still astounds us. In school we were taught that light itself was his primary subject matter of works. That explains why everything's blurry. However, the truth was probably more complicated. Simon Schama wrote in 24 September 2007 issue of the New Yorker:
  
  The procession of phenomenal narrative pictures that constitute [the core of the exhibit at the National Gallery of Art in Washington] makes it clear that we do Turner no favors by pinning the tinny little medal of First Modernist on him. Subject matter meant a great deal to him, and if claiming him for the poetry or the physics of light blinds us to the seriousness which he yearned to be Britain’s first great history painter, he would not have thanked us. What, I believe, he wanted us to see was that, as far as the monumental oils were concerned, all his radical formal experimentation—the trowellings and the “mortary” quality of the paint surface that his critics complained of, the scrapings and rubbings and stainings—was at the service of those grand narratives. It’s correct to think of light as his subject, but when he was most ambitious, light was protagonist in an epic narrative of creation and destruction—an Anglo-Zoroastrian burnout.



• James Turrell.
• Johannes Vermeer. As seen in DC! Very clean. Very neat. Very well-lighted. Very Dutch.
• Jeff Wall, the frozen-but-dramatic-and-dynamic-photographic-image auteur from B.C., now has his own mega travelling retrospective.
• William Wegman also has a well-designed official site.
• Doug Wheeler.

• ACME Los Angeles is often a nice side trip after seeing the nearby but formidable LACMA.
• A+D Museum. The Architecture and Design Museum Los Angeles makes a nice side trip when you’re visiting the almighty LACMA across the street.
• Asian Art Museum, San Francisco.
• The Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia is bizarre, unique, and at times frustrating, but ultimately wonderful. It's now housed in a nice building by Williams and Tsien.
• Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen collection of museums in München includes, among other things, the following gobsmacking blockbusters:
  Alte Pinakothek has the Old Masters.
  Neue Pinakothek has the 19th century and early modern art collections.
  Pinakothek der Moderne has the contemporary art and design exhibits in one of the most impressive buildings that I've ever been in, designed by Stephan Braunfels.
  Museum Brandhorst has more contemporary art, housed in cleverly designed skinny building by Sauerbruch Hutton. Alas, they won't let you photograph any of the interior, let alone the art.
• Bellevue Art Musuem. This suburban museum has a great urban building designed by Steven Holl.
• Berkeley Art Museum and the Pacific Film Archive at the University of California at Berkeley. Here's a museum with integrity; the film archive's wonderful programming of its screenings helps make life in Berkeley worthwhile.
• British Museum, London.
• The Broad in downtown LA.
• Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam has quite an impressive collection of Dutch paintings.
• UCR California Museum of Photography in the University of California at Riverside. My sister Fan works at the former and goes to school at the latter respectively.
• Camden Arts Centre in London.
• Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University.
• Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas is the late Donald Judd's formidable campus of installations by himself and by other compatibly-minded contemporaries like Dan Flavin.
• Chung King Project / Kontainer Gallery. Considering the cluster of galleries on Chung King Road and Court, who would’ve thunk that Chinatown is now one of the coolest places on the planet for art these days. Wait, come to think of it, it actually makes perfect sense. The entire Chinatown feels like an installation. It's a bit exotic, and slightly seedy, and therefore somewhat sexy.
• Dan Flavin Art Institute out in the Hamptons has a few of his pieces permanently installed here.
• De Young Museum, San Francisco.
• Dia Art Foundation somehow manages to collect and focus on artists all whom I happen to admire. Dia:Beacon up the Hudson has the really big stuff.
• The Exploratorium, San Francisco. More than just a science museum, it's a great place to spend an afternoon in the City.
• Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem holds some of my favourite paintings, including the sumptuous Banquet of the Officers of the St. George Militia of Haarlem (1616). With an emphasis on Hals as well as the history of the town of Haarlem, this is a great little museum to spend an afternoon.
• Frye Art Museum on First Hill is free.
• Gagosian Gallery. The one in Beverly Hills is designed by Richard Meier, so bottom line is you know it’s worth your time whatever the art inside.
• Gemäldegalerie, Berlin.
• Gemeentemuseum Den Haag has Mondrians galore.
• Getty Gateway. This site is the place to start exploring the Getty empire. You should also stop by the Getty Information Institute. Finally, this is my take on the Getty.
• Guggenheim Museum in NYC always puts on interesting but easily accessible shows.
• UCLA Hammer Museum in Westwood.
• Haus der Kunst München.
• Henry Art Gallery at University of Washington always has something interesting going.
• Huntington Library was always a favourite place to go for me and my family when I was growing up. I felt like I knew every corner of this place.
• Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.
• Istanbul Modern. I was pleasantly surprised at the strength of its collection of contemporary Turkish and international art.
• Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland.
• Kunsthal Rotterdam boasts a cool building by Koolhaas and an upside-down 'L'.
• Legion of Honor, San Francisco.
• LACE, also known as the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, has been around since I was a kid, and unlike everybody else in the LA art world, it has actually moved west to Hollywood and Wilcox.
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The LACMA buildings looked somewhat weary the last time I was there. It's kind of sad because I grew up with them. It's nice to know that Renzo Piano is going to try and revitalise and integrate the huge complex. Bottom line is that it's still an awesome encyclopaedic collection, especially the works by Dutch and Flemish masters. The travelling blockbuster shows are mostly nice too.
• 
• MAK, also known as das Österreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst, is like the V&A of the German-speaking world.
• MASS MoCA in North Adams, Berkshires is humongous.
• Mauritshuis, Den Haag. With its collection of Dutch masters, this is perhaps the greatest small art museum in the world.
• Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC has something for everyone.
• Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
• MOCA of Los Angeles. Despite its troubled recent history, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (MOCA) is still a wonderful cultural resource for Southern California, and it features buildings designed by Frank Gehry (the Geffen) and Isozaki Arata. A lot of my education started here.
• MUMOK (MUseum MOderner Kunst) is in the almighty MuseumsQuartier Wien. The Ortner & Ortner building doesn't float my boat from the outside, but inside it's a tour de force in my book. Oh yeah, the art's cool inside too.
• Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal is the only place in Canada where you can view collections by famous artists and Old Masters on display.
• Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. The MCASD conversion of the old Santa Fe depot into gallery space is quite nice.
• Museum für Gegenwart im Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin.
• Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City. As a longtime Angeleno, I was pretty late to the game on this wonderfully freaky thang, but better late than never, eh?
• Museum of Modern Art, New York. This is Mecca. Consider praying towards it wherever you are.
• Museum of Television and Radio in Beverly Hills (in a wonderful Richard Meier building) and in New York. Okay, it doesn't really belong on this page, does it? However, I do like to be reminded of all my options whenever I'm in L.A.
• National Gallery, London.
• National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa.
• National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh has a spectacular, modernist (with plenty of Corbusian vocabulary used) tour de force complex designed by the firm of Benson & Forsyth. The soon to be renovated Victorian Royal Museum next door is not too shabby either.
• Nationalmuseum in Stockholm is presented by a very elegant site.
• Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum Japan. Hey, there's also one in Queens.
• Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena. This joint has loads of Degas as well as a substantial Impressionist collection. It even has a few by my favourite Dutch masters, Rembrandt and Hals.
• Oakland Museum of California boasts a home of compelling design. It's also the "only museum devoted to the art, history, and natural sciences of California."
• Orange County Museum of Art.
• Pace Gallery, New York represents many artists of interest.
• 
  There's so much I can say about how the building itself has influenced me over the years (let alone about the exhibitions it has held over the years), but I'm not going to right now.
• Portland Art Museum.
• Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
• Royal Academy of Arts in London.
• Saatchi Gallery at the County Hall features many of the works of naughty young British artists.
• San Francisco Musuem of Modern Art. As my friend once described it, it's a collection of B-grade art by A-list artists. It's also big, ugly, and we're fuckin' stuck with this bloody fuckin' pile o' shite. It looks like a fuckin' bank! What about that big fuckin' drum thing with that bleedin' cunt in the middle? That's so bloody fuckin' creative, eh? So dope that the fuckin' bastard decided to use it in all of his other recent fuckin' projects. That's fuckin' creativity for you! Why so many cretinous tossers around here admire the buggery Botta building is bloody beyond me. No, I take that back. The bloody, buggery building is just the right architecture for pretentious, holier-than-thou, Bay Area yuppie scum who just seem to infest this region like a fuckin' curse. These bloody arseholes think they're soooo fuckin' intelligent simply by the virtue of the fact that they live in that bloody city. C'mon, get real! San Francisco doesn't even have a decent daily newspaper, for Christ's sake! These bloody wankers can all just fuckin' die!!!
• San Jose Museum of Art.
• Seattle Art Museum/ Asian Art Museum/ Olympic Sculpture Park. The main museum building in downtown is housed in an absolutely atrocious Venturi building, but they do have a nice-looking website.
• The Smithsonian. Yeah, it's not a really sexy site, but this one seems to be everywhere on the net, especially on people's homepages. An innocuous site that wouldn't offend your relatives or friends.
• Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
• Tacoma Art Museum has a building designed by Antoine Predock. It sits next to Arthur Erickson's Museum of Glass.
• 
  Notice that this is the old logo. The new sexy logo is just way too trendy for its own good, and I'll be very surprised if it's still around ten years from now.
• UBC Museum of Anthropology not only has a very nice Arthur Erickson building, but there's sometimes interesting contemporary, non-First Nations exhibits inside.
• Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam is housed in Gerrit Rietveld's last building.
• Vancouver Art Gallery is getting a Herzog / de Meuron building, like everyone else.
• Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Like the Tate, it had a brilliant corporate identity makeover by Pentagram.
• White Cube. Think Gagosian, but Cool Britannia London style.
• Whitechapel Art Gallery near Brick Lane in east London.
• Whitney Museum of American Art. Calvin Tomkins once noted in the New Yorker that he heard another critic calling it the "Canada of museums."
• Yale Center for British Art.
• Yale University Art Gallery.
• Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco boasts a Maki and a Polshek building.

• ®TMark. You have to see it to believe it. You can actually fund guerrilla art projects here.
• Art Minimal & Conceptual Only, a tribute to contempory minimalists.
• the-artists.org is a decent and useful clearinghouse site that features major contemporary artists.
• Equator Books in the new, upscale and yuppie Venice is a cool oasis with gallery space. They also like freaks, and sometimes, so should you.
• Nowness shows whatever is inetersting or beautiful, whether it comes from the mainstream or underground. You will not be bored here.
• Poem*Navigator. Beautiful meditations on a Chinese poem sponsored by the Stedelijk.
• Sister Wendy's Kunstgeschichten is a site dedicated to the renowed host of the BBC series, who's an absolutely delightful interpreter of art. She has made me appreciate works which I had previously overlooked or ignored.
• Taschen. Whenever you're in LA, be sure to stop by their Beverly Hills store designed by Philippe Starck. It's a compact space, enveloped by lacquered walnut and perfect lighting for browsing. It's almost a traditionally elegant space, as opposed to the usual erotic, avant-chic environments you'd expect from Starck.
• V2_Organisation, Institute for Unstable Media in Rotterdam not only produces and sells interesting publications, but also events, festivals, installations that examines any aspects relating to the role of media and technology.
• De Waag in Amsterstam has a nice-looking site.

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