Ann Philbin

Until this year, Vishal Jugdeo's videos were dramatically low-budget affairs. The artist had a crew of two, counting himself and a director of photography and not counting actors whom he occasionally asked to hold a boom pole. He used his small studio in Highland Park as a stage set. The bare-bones feel fed some of his central themes, like the wooden language of what passes for emotional intimacy and the artifices of mainstream TV, exposed through absurdly halting dialogue and deliberately mechanical acting.

Resplendent in a Dior sleeveless kimono, Givenchy leopard-print tights and funky Rick Owens boots, the violin virtuoso Hahn-Bin brings to mind an ultra-chic Buddhist monk as he strolls through the Hammer Museum in Westwood. His eyes and lips, outlined in black, give his face a mask-like delicacy, and his tuft of black hair sweeps upward like a candle flame. But despite his obvious flair for the dramatic, there's nothing remotely standoff-ish about the 22-year-old musician and performance artist, who'll appear Thursday night in "The Five Poisons," a semi-staged cultural mash-up of works ranging from Chopin's "Nocturne #20" to John Cage's "In a Landscape," in the Billy Wilder Theater.

The organizers of Pacific Standard Time signaled their intention to start spreading the word about their colossal visual arts collaboration set to start in October 2011 at a media event Thursday at the members-only Soho House on Sunset Boulevard. In attendance were dozens of local museum directors and publicists. In essence, Pacific Standard Time is a set of museum exhibitions that will each in their own way explore the birth of the L.A. art scene, to be staged by about 50 institutions next fall in Southern California.

No, she didn't actually sleep in the museum. But for three months, artist Dawn Kasper set up a "nomadic studio" on the third floor of the Whitney Museum in New York that acquired the lived-in look of a dorm room. By the end odd gifts from visitors, like stickers and record albums, joined her own piles of books, drawings, clothes and music. Kasper's studio was one of the projects - along with concerts, dance performances, poetry readings, film screenings and guerrilla art installations - that earned the 2012 Whitney Biennial some of its best reviews.

When Ann Philbin arrived in Los Angeles last January, she took the reins of a young art museum with a troubled past and huge promise. Westwood's Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Cultural Center, which had its rocky debut in 1990, was a tiresome $100-million monument to its founder's overweening ego. Five years after opening, with Hammer dead and the museum adrift, a merger was brokered with neighboring UCLA.

It was not your usual scene from "Keeping Up With the Kardashians. " In a crimson gown by Georges Hobeika, Kim Kardashian was touring the new Renzo Piano-designed Resnick Pavilion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. After posing on the red carpet, she tweeted, "I'm at the most magnificent masquerade ball at the LACMA Museum!" to some 5 million followers. Welcome to gala season in the art world, the time when L.A.'s leading museums roll out red carpets and stage black-tie parties to raise money ?

The UCLA Hammer Museum has a coup on its exhibition lineup for next fall. "Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective" -- co-organized with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, but scheduled to debut in Los Angeles (Oct. 7, 2003 to Jan. 12, 2004) -- is the first major exhibition in more than 30 years to survey this famously reclusive artist's work.

After more than a year-long search, the Hammer Museum has hired Connie Butler, currently the chief curator of drawings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as its chief curator. She is leaving that position by July 1 in order to assume her L.A. post mid-month. Around the same time, Aram Moshayedi , 31, known for his work with the alternative art spaces REDCAT and LAX Art, will join the museum as a curator in a newly created position. PHOTOS: Arts and culture in pictures by The Times Butler, 50, is a well-known and well-liked figure in the art world, admired for championing artists who are not art-market darlings  - and sometimes unfamiliar even to avid museum-goers.

Four Los Angeles exhibitions, including two devoted to 20th century abstract art, are among the top winners in the 2003-2004 International Association of Art Critics / USA Awards.

Trustees of the Museum of Contemporary Art announced Wednesday that they have raised more than $50 million since the middle of March for the museum's endowment. A larger endowment is widely seen as the first step to turning around the troubled institution. Last month trustees identified $100 million as the goal for its endowment campaign, saying that donations and pledges had brought it up to $60 million. But they declined to name specific donors or provide a timeline for when they would receive the money.