“EVERY TERRIBLE THING always begins in the prettiest weather. Cruelty loves a clear sky. . . . Every war starts on a perfect day,” hollered the lead singer in the opening number of Diane Severin Nguyen’s War Songs at MoCA on the Saturday of LA Art Week. It was sung the same day that the US and Israel began bombing Iran.
I feel like we’ve entered the Weimar Berlin era of our collective slow dive into fascism. Glitter and doom. I ran with some kind of mad desperation between openings and performances, dinners and parties, art fairs and artist talks, underground clubs and curated gardens. I fell in love again with my city and its art workers, all this extraordinary art under the prettiest weather, a clear sky, a series of perfect days—while the world came apart.
In seven days, I went to 25 exhibitions and openings, 7 talks, 5 art fairs, 4 performances, at least 11 parties I was actually invited to, and 3 more that I totally crashed. I jumped into 2 pools. I attended whatever the 99 Cent Store show was. And just 1 actual gala. This all feels like the sputtering chatter of R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine).”
“Nobody thinks about the fires anymore. It’s good we’re moving on,” artist Kathryn Andrews told me that first Monday of LA Art Week, as we stood steps from the erotic performers at the VIP opening for Steven Arnold’s Cocktails in Heaven at Del Vaz Projects. A year after the fires, evidence of the event remained in the work—the theatrically charred columns for Christina Quarles at Hauser & Wirth, the lonesome endurance of a fireplace by Kelly Akashi premiering in the Whitney Biennial on the other side of the continent—but few talked about them. Just too much has happened, is happening. Last week I saw pro-Palestinian protesters pass by the arch of Paramount Studios at sunset, a perpetual protest against Elon Musk camped outside the Tesla Diner on Santa Monica Boulevard, and a homeless encampment catch fire outside Jonas Wood’s studio in Silver Lake.
On that first Saturday, I wept watching Berenice Olmedo’s Nabila (2026) at François Ghebaly, an exoskeleton made of medical plastics, joinery, aluminum, and a pediatric hip-knee-ankle-foot orthosis. Shaded a pale lavender, covered with a pattern of unicorns, and the exact size and shape of a small child, it was posed as if struggling to rise, like a marionette on thin wires. Later that night I gawked at the latest segment of Judith F. Baca’s Great Wall of Los Angeles at Deitch: After fifty years of ever-expanding mural-making, here on view was the segment detailing the 1970s, unspooling across twelve-foot panels—Alcatraz, Angela Davis, the Chicano Moratorium, Kent State, a political history that just keeps going. And I felt the echoing sunsets, double exposures, and fragile chalks of Tacita Dean at Marian Goodman.
Past the paintings of Dustin Hodges at Sebastian Gladstone and the installations of Zenobia Lee & Grigoris Semitecolo at Sea View, I sat at the bar of the overstuffed Clark Street Diner in Hollywood while Sea View’s Sara Lee Hantman stood on the curving counter next to Gladstone: “There’s only one other person that’s as aggressive as me in the city, and that’s Sebastian Gladstone.” They are two of the best young art dealers in the city; an appreciative crowd cheered them on. Later, driving past Jeffrey Deitch’s house, I saw the party for Baca spilling out the windows and simply walked in—Cary Grant’s old pool winked from the garden, but not this time. I crashed some annual Frieze birthday bash after that, then the Chateau Marmont pool at 1 a.m., though being invited there felt almost disappointing.
The following Monday I spun past Hitler with his head bashed in by Paul McCarthy at the Journal Gallery in West Hollywood; perused the wares at the former home of Spago for “Paging Dr. Feelgood,” a temporary exhibition organized by Ben Lee Handler of Perrotin artists; and finally landed at Del Vaz in Santa Monica for an over-the-top fete that replicated the excess of the Arnold prints on view there. At this house gallery, once Shirley Temple’s childhood home, French waiters greeted me at the door in Marie Antoinette–ish garb that included jackets handpainted by Arnold, holding guest lists scrolling to the floor. I wasn’t listed, but they let me in anyway.
Tuesday I watched Luc Tuymans and UCCA curator Peter Eleey tour the artist’s latest at Zwirner: Rothko-ish color fields folding into a rotting fruit basket and the hot red urgency of faceless migrants at a border, splintered across a grid like a fractured screen, which is apparently America these days. I ran past the brilliant sculptural rebuses by Richard Rezac at Chris Sharp Gallery before stumbling into the series of windowed closets in an eerie coworking space on Wilshire Boulevard that was Away from Desk, five galleries including Gene’s Dispensary, Leroy’s, O-Town House, Five Churches, and the Fulcrum, organized by Keith J. Varadi as, in his words, not an alternative art fair but an alternative to art fairs. This shared the same landlord, I’m told, as the shuttered 99 Cent Store next door, boarded up since the fires and used as a mutual aid space in the interim, the exhibition rumored to have pushed them out. Now Barry McGee and The Hole’s “99cents” filled it: over 200 artists, 4,000 artworks, billed as an artist healing center, which is either utopian or exactly what was needed. It felt like being punched in the face by 10,000 screams. Everyone I talked to really loved it.
I ended that night at a rooftop gala for the Bombay Beach Biennial at the Petit Hermitage hotel, where under the stars BBB Systems Architect and filmmaker Dulcinee DeGuere read a speech astride a clown: “As we gather here tonight to celebrate the margins, LA is being taken over by Frieze and the stench of fluorescent commercial art fairs. You know as well as I do that the art in those fairs is not alive.”
The following morning I stood over the pool at the Roosevelt Hotel looking at the blue waves David Hockney painted at the bottom, now almost disappeared. The Felix Art Fair hummed around me, people leaping from the bushes of various cabanas hosting galleries. Upstairs Channing Hansen in his Simone Forti shirt (“Art Keeps Me Strong”) and checkered flannel curiously matching his webbed installations and threaded wallworks. It was a shock to see Jeff Poe back to art dealing, allegedly only as a stand-in for the ailing Kirk Nelson of La Loma Projects. And it’s always easy to fall in love with the atomic noir narratives playing out over William Leavitt’s paintings, brought to the fair by Marc Selwyn.
Afterward I traipsed by Bjorn Copeland’s remixes at Michael Benevento before stopping in to the inaugural ENZO Art Fair at Alabaster Projects, a gorgeous old building along Temple in Echo Park. Founded by collector R Parmar, ENZO scraps fees entirely for its nine invited galleries, all drawn from New York’s Lower East Side and Chinatown. “No build-out, no division, no walls,” Parmar said—just nine galleries he loves, sharing a room. One gallerist told me it was letting her breathe. Given the week, I understood exactly what she meant.
That evening I was heart-struck by Milton Avery at KARMA, then by the hard chroma of Ellsworth Kelly, which was followed by a party tucked down the alley at Matthew Marks. I spotted Alex Israel in the crowd. At Frieze, he had a sunset—a set painting of the Paramount arch off Melrose. It looked different without the protesters. After that a garden party at Marian Goodman followed by a standing dinner with KARMA at Osteria Mozza.
The next day the Frieze Projects stopped me before I even got inside, all part of a program titled “Body & Soul” organized by the Art Production Fund. Polly Borland’s BOD (2023), a seven-foot cast-aluminum figure summoned from her signature pantyhosed models, finished in matte automotive paint, powdery pink and monumental. Amanda Ross-Ho rolled her Sisyphean sixteen-foot inflatable Earth counterclockwise around the perimeter of the airport soccer field all day in Untitled Orbit (MANUAL MODE); I was flummoxed by the sheer durational labor of it, the world turning on its own slow axis. A punching bag by Puppies Puppies greeted every visitor to the fair: A metaphor for how I feel—my identity is being used (2026), painted with the colors of the trans flag. My favorite all-around booth belonged to Parker Gallery, doing an exhibition of paintings by Marley Freeman with walls draped in fabrics from her family’s textile business, Textile Artifacts. Running the fabrics between my fingers, I felt the lick of Marley’s colors. A half hour and a few miles away, the double entendre of Post-Fair wasn’t lost on me as I saw all the collectors and advisers who’d finished early at Frieze haunting the former post office. Easily sliding through the collegial grace and chill vibes, I lingered near Edward Kay’s unnaturally attractive fruit at Roland Ross’s section of the fair.
That afternoon I stopped first at the Schindler Spec House on West Ellis Avenue in Inglewood for David Horvitz’s NN(s) Project(s), images, texts, and objects installed in one of three homes Rudolph Schindler designed on speculation in 1939, then into Horvitz’s garden in Arlington Heights for One Hundred Year Old Water (cocurated with poet Sophie Appel). David Ireland’s concrete dumbballs and found-material assemblages were scattered amid the foliage alongside Anaïs Franco’s pink ceramic rocks, replicas of the stones Japanese immigrant farmers scattered in their fields before the war to fool birds away from strawberries, a practice that outlasted the incarceration that took the farmers themselves.
The sleeper hit of the week for me was SHOW-LA, a photography fair produced by three art-book publishers, Nazraeli Press, Setanta Books, and Micamera, spread across the fourth floor of the Reef in downtown Los Angeles. Past a tribute to Martin Parr, I stopped into a panel organized by Kathryn Andrews through her project the Judith Center, which seeks to confront systematized misogyny through the arts, now moderating a discussion on wartime photography. The featured speaker was Kateryna Radchenko, the Ukrainian-born founder of Odesa Photo Days, who remarked that only women her age are able to leave her homeland right now. Her presentation was not of war photography but about the experience of war, and it concluded with an anonymous image: a regular soldier in an abandoned house in the war zone, furniture untouched around him, snapping a selfie in the mirror. That evening I read at the Wallace launch at OCHI on Western, Gregory Barnett dancing an interpretation mostly beside me, smashing a watermelon safely outside of the luscious Cooper Cox paintings on view—still wet, and all sold.
The next day, the last, I was sitting watching the slow billow of mushroom clouds rising from Bikini Atoll in Bruce Conner’s Crossroads, 1976, Terry Riley’s magisterial music echoing over eight channels at the Marciano Art Foundation, when a friend showed me an announcement on their phone. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had been killed by the war started that morning by Donald Trump. Una Szeemann’s spoke of the presentation of items collected by her father, the legendary curator Harald Szeemann. Thoughtfully displayed in the Marciano’s library, the show felt like a gentle sigh amid it all, as she spoke about the objects finding new life here, describing Harry’s use of wine boxes to organize his brilliant clusterfuck of possessions: “The more I drink, the more order I get.” (A prayer for art fairs.)
The war seemed to haunt every step from that point forward, including in the eerie beauty of rumbling sound around Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork’s Gama 1213-B, 2026, at Canary Test. Armatures held ceramic tiles pressed from molds of Okinawan cave surfaces, while a twenty-point-one channel sound system belted out the architectural reverb of Barrack 1213-B at Tule Lake, where the artist’s family was jailed. The caves of Okinawa and the incarceration camps of California fused into a single sonic memorial, its architectural genealogy an echo of ICE detention facilities.
That night I caught the West Coast premiere of Nguyen’s War Songs, which debuted at Performa in New York last November and is structured as an anti–Vietnam War concert: Eleven performers remixed protest anthems and folk songs snarling past resistance through the present, with music arranged by Laszlo Horvath, who also sang one of the leading roles. Later, up Bunker Hill, I caught Kyp Malone performing a live activation inside Matana Roberts’s immersive installation spiral resonance: a study in the abstract at REDCAT, part of the Industry’s LAB series. The gallery itself served as the artist’s primary instrument: “This one is called ‘They Are Already Building Camps, We Have to Do Something Before the Midterms.’ . . . Available on Spotify?” Later that evening, I ran to Grupo Ñ’s exhibition and party at Bar Latino in East Hollywood, the triumphant return of Los Super Elegantes, dropping off birthday presents for poet Joseph Moscone and artist and Semiotext(e) editor Hedi El Kholti.
Somewhere across town, Tobey Maguire, Jonas Wood, and dozens more were competing in the World Series of Art Poker, but I ended the night and the week being dragged around a pool soaked in red light at a party thrown by the Box, NOON Projects, and Alexis Borges. Bathed in the glow of hanging lanterns, artist Nao Bustamante splashed past on a floatie; Quarles laughed by the pool bar. The boys caressed each other in the pool. The queers could laugh and swim freely. Throngs danced. Glitter and doom. I danced.