By Alex Banx
Los Angeles, California (The Hollywood Times) 02/20/2024
This past Sunday wrapped up the last night of the 2024 LA Art Show at the LA Convention Center in Downtown LA. It was the opinion of many art admirers and collectors that this year featured the best exhibits we’ve seen in years.
Making space for self-identified artists that may have simply had too much free time and too much money during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. The prints and paintings displayed on the gallery walls from the last few years were dominated by soulless, mediocre, copycat pop-art.
One such artist stood out more than the others this year, Serron Green.
Without getting too much into identity politics, Serron’s worked may come off as Black art for socially segregated people, gimmicky, but very marketable.
We had a chance to speak with Serron. His work obviously not having much depth, we asked, “How long have you been making art?”
Nice guy. He was friendly and very excited we expressed interest in his art.
He stated the pieces on display were all new and the enormous price tag reflected such.
Image is everything, with visual arts. Regardless of one’s ethnicity or the effort put into a piece, displaying artwork motivated by the image of Black Power tells a story about the person (or establishment) that puts the art on display, often more than the art or artist tells a story.
While he is no Karen Walker, Serron’s work was the only boldly Black art of the evening and hopefully sold-out.
Ai has its pros and cons, mostly cons, but Ai simply means a lot of codes taken from other codes. This year’s LA Art Show featured a walk-up interactive exhibit that invited guests to type in short prompts (words), hit create, let the Ai works its “magic”, the image would print it out like a Polaroid, and we could take it home.
The instructions were to “type a word or phrase that brings a strong emotional remembrance or memory to you”, 8 words max, I typed in the 3 words. My first attempt was a fail. Their coding couldn’t process it. We thought it might be an internet connection issue at first, but no, the loading icon on the 20ft screen eventually stopped twirling. I tried it again.
Still, no? The words were chosen from my genuine experiences, but they were too real.
Third try, I got less specific, and it worked. The output image was much more fun and exciting than my actual memory, but I liked it.
After guests attempted to recreate our memories with Ai, the last 12 images produced remained on display on the 20 ft projection. Interestingly, many of other people’s memories were food related.
Now on to the good art!
As mentioned earlier, this year introduced a lot of beautiful, creative, thoughtful, classic, and original works; we wanted to highlight some of our favorites.
Dr. Boris Shpeizman is a glass artist specializing in Hot Glass Blowing.
Gustav Klimt, was an Austrian symbolist painter and Diaz Alama, is a Fine Arts graduate from the University of Barcelona. His art blends classical realism with contemporary aesthetics. He founded the Barcelona Academy of Art in 2013..
Emilio Cárdenas, is a painter and designer, whose sensitivity and technical led him to occupy an important place among the best Spanish artists with greater international projection.
MARCK, is a contemporary Swiss artist known for his melding of sculpture and video installations. The artist’s use of sculpted metal frames to confine his videos of women, function as metaphors for the boundaries women face in society.
Black Hair
Carlos Castro’s myth stories. Carlos Castro Arias, is Colombian artist, professor and musician. His practice departs from the appropriation of historical images and the formal and symbolic re-contextualization of found objects.
While this year was a major step forward for the LA art scene, we hope to see more queer and female artists represented next year.
Thank you to Pink’s Hot Dogs for returning this year and feeding us!
This year’s LA Art Show benefitted the American Heart Association.
