ART

Leo Politi captured some of Los Angeles' most charming places with his two dozen children's books and countless artworks. With brush and pencil, he immortalized the city's crumbling Victorian mansions, its parks and its ethnic diversity long before "multicultural" entered the language. Hailed as "the Artist of Olvera Street," Politi, who died in 1996, is commemorated in other neighborhoods and in cities including South Pasadena, Redlands and his native Fresno.

Writer Will Blythe asked artist Rachel Mason to accompany him and draw the candidates as he covered the John Edwards campaign last year. It's an electronic world these days, jittery with what passes for communication, especially on the campaign trail. Case in point: the Citadel, Charleston, S.C., July 2007. Here we are in yet another spin room after yet another presidential debate, this one for the Democrats, sponsored by CNN and YouTube.

For eight days, protesters paraded in front of one of Little Saigon's leading newspapers. They carried an effigy of Ho Chi Minh and called the editors "traitors" for running a photo they said was so offensive that it had to be the work of communist sympathizers. Two top editors at the newspaper were replaced several days later.

PARIS -- At age 96, artist Louise Bourgeois has lost none of her ability to startle and unsettle: Her latest major series includes giant etchings of her own body -- including esophagus, stomach and intestines -- all soaked with blood-red gouache. The 11 panels are a gallery-sized lament on the limitations of the body, with Bourgeois describing her own physical sensations in spindly handwriting. One panel almost moans: "The breathing, the palpitations, THE HOT FLASHES."

How does it feel to share the limelight with rock legend Bob Dylan? This year's Pulitzer Prizes honored two musical innovators who tend to reject categorization: A special citation went to singer-songwriter Dylan, and the annual music award went to composer and Los Angeles native David Lang. In an interview Monday, Lang enthusiastically mixed metaphors: "You know, I am not fit to touch the hem of his shoes. Bob Dylan is the only artist who's in heavy rotation in my household."

When artist Robert Smithson assembled a massive spiral unfurling into the Great Salt Lake 38 years ago, there was no indication that this remote spot would be altered again by humans any time soon. Smithson's work, called "Spiral Jetty," became a world-renowned piece of art, its striking man-made pattern created amid isolation. Now art lovers fear it is threatened by plans to explore for oil a few miles offshore.

"Video is a fugitive medium," said Getty Research Institute's Glenn R. Phillips, and he should know. As curator for "California Video," running at the Getty through June 8, he enjoyed the luxury of a massive archive produced during the '60s, '70s and '80s. The challenge: Most of the tapes, recorded in obsolete formats, were crusted with oxidized crud that made the work unwatchable and threatened to ruin any playback deck hardy enough to play them.

It's A quiet Sunday morning in this city of cacophonous ambition. Construction has yet to hit a deafening pitch, and traffic is still moving. But, as the temperature rises, all sorts of art activity bubbles up in the historic Bastakiya district, a low-lying island of traditional Arabian houses in a sea of modern high-rises.

IT COULD very well be a mirage: A trick of the glaring morning sun or something misread in the pre-caffeinated early morning haze. But no. Upon closer inspection, that brown-and-white sign, hanging just beneath the red slash of the "No Left/U-Turn" symbol on a sparsely landscaped traffic island, proclaims exactly what you first thought: "The Islands of LA Nat'l Park."

Joe AND Etsuko Price are back. Twenty-five years ago, they joined with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to fulfill a dream. The Prices donated $5 million to help construct the Pavilion for Japanese Art and promised a spectacular collection of Japanese paintings to the museum. Five years later, the building was completed: an eye-popping, lotus-like structure on the east end of the museum campus.