Welcome to HELP DESK, where I answer your queries about making, exhibiting, finding, marketing, buying, selling — or any other activity related to — contemporary art. Together, we’ll sort through some of art’s thornier issues. Email helpdesk@dailyserving.com with your questions. All submissions remain anonymous. HELP DESK is sponsored in part by KQED.org. As an independent curator also affiliated with the programming of a commercial space,[.....]

Alright, I’ll say it. A show that features conceptual art circa 1970 threatens to be dry. At the outset, you know you’ll be getting mostly documentation: photographic, video, film, and paper. Beyond the ordinary wall text, there will probably be artists’ statements explaining what was done while you weren’t looking. The typewriter, the mimeograph, and the camera will act as not-so-silent partners to the artists’[.....]

Today’s post is brought to you by our friends at Huffington Post Arts. Read below to learn about John Baldessari’s new public work in New York City. It’s no big shocker that we are not at our finest economic hour, but John Baldessari may have stumbled upon a solution to our money woes. All this time we have been trying to make more money, when[.....]

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Alex Van Gelder had a rare privilege: he spent the last year of Louise Bourgeois’s life in her town house, photographing her. His opulent, raw images of the art goddess appear in the September issue of W Magazine, along with idiosyncratic tributes by artists and friends (Wendy Williams remembers a dinner of[.....]

Rise of Rebellion: DailyServing’s latest week-long series Today, Bean Gilsdorf looks at some of the artists that have broken the art world’s mold in her latest article Rebellion, Four Ways, as a continuation of our week-long series Rise of Rebellion. Not long ago I had a conversation with a fellow artist.  “I’m thirty years old,” she said, “and I’ve never really rebelled.”  We talked about[.....]

Today on DailyServing, we have gone to our wonderful friends at the Huffington Post for a brilliant article on the Baldessari retrospective, Pure Beauty, at LACMA. LA-based arts writer, Rebecca Taylor, eloquently lists some of the lessons learned from the work on view. 1. It’s all relative, especially Beauty I can’t imagine a more fitting title for Baldessari’s current retrospective (on view at LACMA through[.....]

L.A. Expanded: Notes from the West Coast A weekly column by Catherine Wagley Hans Holbein painted The Body of the Dead Christ Laid Out in His Tomb in 1521. In it, Christ’s harrowed face and tortured body don’t actually look dead; they look comatose with pain and on the verge of dying, but not quite gone.  The fact that most of his peers took a[.....]