Lifestyle // Entertainment

In launching the first Frieze Los Angeles this month, the prolific and independent art platform with three magazines, an art academy and now four international art fairs (including Frieze New York, Frieze London, and Frieze Masters) is bringing the best of the contemporary art world to one of its most receptive and forward-looking capitals.

Greatly engaged in advancing global arts, and one of its linchpins, Los Angeles is fertile ground for the Feb. 14-17 art fair that will be held—with or without irony—during another glittering awards season at Paramount Pictures Studios. At the helm is a cast of serious L.A. art insiders, notably Executive Director Bettina Korek (founder of ForYourArt) and curator Ali Subotnick (formerly curator at the Hammer Museum).

The tie to Hollywood makes it a more interesting moment for the event, with its locale, though generally unconventional, not especially so for a Frieze art fair, which is typically out-of-the-box so far as settings are concerned, with custom structures by significant architects. To this end, there is Kulapat Yantrasast.

The founder and creative director of L.A. architectural firm wHY designed a bespoke structure for the smaller and more focused yet creatively ambitious Frieze Los Angeles whose program aspires to a broader conversation about contemporary art and culture.

Hamza Walker of LAXART will curate Frieze Talks and Frieze Music, while his counterpart Subotnick heads Frieze Projects, which will feature works of performance, installation, and sculpture scattered throughout a cinematically familiar street on Paramount’s NYC backlot. These pieces are best understood as responses to the unorthodox context.

Participation for Frieze Los Angeles is substantial, with the roughly 70 participating galleries including locally known names like The Box, The Pit, Regen Projects, and David Kordansky Gallery, along with a robust international representation. Frieze Week, meanwhile, will run Feb. 11-17 and feature a spectrum of related events, from gallery opening to talks and more. frieze.com

PHOTOGRAPHS: BY LINDA NYLIND, COURTESY OF LINDA NYLIND/FRIEZE

From downtown L.A. loft to browser’s bohemia, The Last Bookstore is a reading refuge for bibliophiles

The independent bookstore, so ablaze with ideas, offers something tangible in a world when vast swaths of the population might go about life with little human interaction for days on end. With conversation and exchange (and almost always a few curious regulars milling about), bookshops are the lifeblood of communities still lucky enough to have them.

One of these enclaves is Downtown Los Angeles, where in 2011, Josh Spencer showed uncommon resolve in unsure digital times by opening the Last Bookstore in the Spring Arts Tower at 5th & Spring, the third chapter of a success story that started in an L.A. loft, moved to a small place at 4th & Main, then set up shop as a behemoth of a brick-and-mortar, with 22,000 square feet of retail space, art galleries and shops on the mezzanine level, an Art & Rare Books Annex, and a mammoth catalog of some 250,000 titles.

Now California’s largest operator of new and used books, along with vinyl records, the Last Bookstore runs a brisk but selective buy-sell-trade business. Do you want a beat-up second-hander? How about a scratched-to-death record (CD or DVD)? Neither do these folks. The place trades in mint-condition inventory, much of it hard to find. (The original Sweet Valley High series? It’s here.)

Housed in an old bank, the Last Bookstore is columned and maze-like, with ceilings as high as the heavens, bank vault reading rooms, a tunnel made of books and other curiosities. Together, these touches evoke what could easily be the prop department of a Baz Luhrmann movie. It’s theater, the Last Bookstore, magical in the way old places can be—distressed here, dressed there, with period details of so much soul. Walls painted dark, a lustrous bit of custom lighting, all “makes the store feel like a trip to the past,” says manager Katie Orphan. And a bit of a trip, period. There’s also a stunning bit of local art from artists with galleries above the store, and an upstairs labyrinth that leads shoppers on a paper chase through a warren of books.

Spencer, the creative engine of the place and a born orchestrator with clear smarts, understands that for the Last Bookstore to survive in the age of Amazon, it needs to serve as a community’s cultural core. This it does, with an atmosphere unlike anything else, with a rabbit hole of events, ranging from the expected (author talks, community meetings, book clubs for feminists, horror fans, etc.) to more unorthodox fare (an evening with the cast of Portlandia, pop-up dinners, the wedding of authors Ransom Riggs and Tehereh Mafi).

Engagement might just be the most important of all independent bookstore bona fides, its competitive leg up. “There are things at which an independent bookstore really excels, like having knowledgeable staff who can make personalized recommendations of books to customers, and that’s hard to replicate online,” says Orphan. “We can recommend sleeper titles and promote lesser-known authors in a way that other retailers aren’t necessarily equipped to do.”

With all the screen time we’re logging these days, even the idea of a bookstore feels mooring, the flip of a page all the more reassuring in its consistency, the encounter of a new character a thrill in the finding. This is true everywhere, but poignantly so in Los Angeles, a city with a contradictory nature, progressive but rooted to the independent spirit of the West, that sense of willingness and freedom to do whatever one wants—be it build, or grow, or create. The revitalization of the city’s downtown matches the Last Bookstore’s ability to tap into our analog side while speaking to a larger literary renaissance.

“People don’t like to lose something that they’ve loved for centuries,” said Spencer in a Vimeo video. Not a new concept, perhaps, but novel — lastbookstorela.com.

Written by Jenn Thornton  |  Photography Courtesy of The Last Bookstore

The Norton Simon Museum honors the sculpture of Edgar Degas

In 1917, Edgar Degas, the French artist renowned for his dreamy depictions of ballet dancers, died in Paris. Marking the 100-year anniversary of his death, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, home to one of the most remarkable collections of the artist’s works in the world, presents Taking Shape: Degas as Sculptor.

Though best known for his Impressionist oil paintings and pastels, Degas was quite the sculptor. He may have only exhibited one sculpture during his career—the bronze Little Dancer, Aged Fourteen (1878-81), which broke tradition with its realistic, features, silk slippers and wig of human hair—but during his life, Degas produced hundreds of them.

After his death, 150 of these small-scale modèles, fashioned in wax, plaster and clay and depicting horses, dancers and bathers, were taken from Degas’s studio. Of these, 74 among those in the best condition were picked by the artist’s heirs to be preserved in bronze. Remarkably, the Norton Simon Museum has acquired 72 (the fate of the remaining two is not known). To note, the modèles accurately preserve the state of the sculptures as they originally stood in Degas’s studio, reflecting the tactile, focused way in which the artist worked, down to the pressed texture of the original wax and plaster.

Taking Shape: Degas as Sculptor presents the entire collection of Degas’s bronze modèles, brought together for the first time, and accompanied by his pastels, drawings, and paintings. It’s an opportunity to see the artist’s creative output gathered across media and materials, and to ponder Degas’s lifelong pursuit of capturing the form and movement of living beings—perfectly correct in their details; unidealized and beautiful.

The exhibit runs from Nov 10 to April 9, 2018. Tip: When visiting the Norton Simon Museum, take time to stroll the grounds, including the lovely pond, sculpture garden and Garden Cafe, which has plenty of shaded seating and is operated by Patina Restaurant Group.