The North Atlantic water plied by Greta Thunberg in 2019 was around one degree Fahrenheit warmer and 30% more acidic than that which claimed Bas Jan Ader’s life in 1975. The Arctic sea ice has reached record lows, and soon the combination of cold melts and sun-warmed open ocean will negate the currents that carried Bas Jan’s boat to the tip of Ireland. Greta made it. Bas Jan didn’t. It had to be so.

Still from Remote Viewing, 2011, digital film for projection, color/sound. Total running time: 15 minutes, 24 seconds. Cauleen Smith grew up in Riverside and Sacramento, California, and recently returned to the Southland as faculty in the art school at the California Institute of the Arts. Her experimental films and…

Graffiti sprayed across the entrance of Nicodim Gallery in Boyle Heights, 2016, photo: Liz O. Baylen, Los Angeles Times Perhaps we ought to think of painting as a ghetto waiting to be gentrified. —Walead Beshty, “The Whiteness of the Whale”1 High on the…

Nearly 100 years ago, Edward Bernays pioneered the wily world of advertising, the manipulative business of telling the public what they want. When a 2012 Jack in the Box ad campaign tossed together corporate damage control, social commentary, and irreverence, a big dash of William Burroughs landed in Bernays’s original recipe.

In 1966, Mark di Suvero’s Artists’ Tower of Protest, created in collaboration with the Los Angeles–based Artists' Protest Committee, became a lightning rod for the anti-war movement. Over the next 50 years, as the tower was dismantled, reconfigured, and re-contextualized, history has had its intractable way with the original work.