Artists

Seven months after an unprecedented auction of Soviet contemporary art in Moscow, artists whose works brought record prices remain in the news. Exhibitions of their work are springing up throughout Europe and the United States, and critical reviews of their shows appear with increasing frequency in the art press. But what about Soviet artists who were left out of the sale? Have they benefited from glasnost?

This weekend at Coachella, about 190 acts will return for the second, and final, weekend of the annual festival. And the simple truth is, whether you're headed to Indio, recovering from last weekend's festival and looking for some couch viewing on the Web or merely curious to witness new sounds of today, it will be impossible to catch everything. A shame, but not the end of the world; unsurprisingly, not everything was great. As someone who went last week intent on catching as many new and/or unsung acts as possible, I returned with opinions on what to see and not. Below are a few tips.

Plastic lined the floors of the Little Tokyo gallery and globs of brightly colored paint ? neon yellow, poppy orange, Easter egg blue ? were splattered everywhere: in the gallery entranceway, out front on the sidewalk, down the shirts and across the faces of the artists setting up their mural installations. A four-person street art crew ? which goes by, simply, Nomadé ? worked in sync to a mix of punk, hip-hop and thrash music, putting finishing touches on a mural of contemporary Los Angeles anchored by a nine-foot-high Greco-Roman soldier.

After plummeting for more than a decade, music sales have finally leveled off. Yet the vast majority of artists and bands collect less from music sales than they would from working two weeks at a food court at the mall. It may be easier than ever before to record and distribute songs, but that just means it's harder than ever to stand out in the crowd at the iTunes Store. Steve Koskie, a tech entrepreneur and music industry veteran, thinks he can help. Koskie is chief executive of Monkeybars , a Los Gatos, Calif.-based site the gives artists the tools to sell their music virally through their websites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter and hundreds of other outlets.

Following its group shows of area painters and sculptors, Another Year in LA now presents "Drawing (Los Angeles). " Featuring five artists (plus a cameo appearance by non-local Stephen Kaltenbach), the show is a sampler more than a survey but manages to convey, with a good deal of verve, how elastic the category of drawing has become. Materials matter less than manner of approach -- a certain rawness, directness, immediacy. John Knuth's word paintings spelled out using emergency road flares and Christopher Russell's scratched and spray-painted "Framing Exercises" are all tactile energy.

Skid row may be known for its devastating poverty and homelessness, but the Festival for All Skid Row Artists will underline a different aspect of the downtown community — its artistic potential. Lots of neighborhood artists (those who live and work there) will participate in visual art, music and spoken word as well as a documentation project meant to preserve the neighborhood's creativity. Gladys Park, 6th Street and Gladys Avenue, L.A. noon-4 p.m. Fri. and Sat. Free. lapovertydept.org.

Pick-up artists -- you've got your own app now. Neil Strauss, author of the best-selling books on the modern art of seduction -- "The Game" and "Rules of the Game" -- has launched A Better Man, an app that turns hitting on women into a secret-agent-style, real-time-playable adventure. "By purchasing this app, you're accepting a challenge. A challenge that will take you on a journey," the creators of the app write on iTunes. "You will receive missions. As you move through the missions, you will require more and more skills.

The flip side of enduring summer's spate of grab-bag group exhibitions is getting to see work by new artists. “Acirema,” at Honor Fraser, provides a fine platform for eight talented artists of Latin American origin, several exhibiting in L.A. for the first time. The show is light on its feet, despite a ponderous rationale. The title of the exhibition is “America” spelled backwards, which curator Cesar Garcia intends to signal an alternative to dominant modes of thinking. However, the selected works invoke a very familiar system of knowledge - that of global conceptual art. With artists hailing from Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic and Mexico, the show ends up reinforcing rather than puncturing the contours of that grab-bag place, Latin America.

Here's a hot clubland tip: There's a venue near the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Ivar Avenue in Hollywood where indie-electronica artists playing major L.A. headlining dates will hop on a laptop for exclusive after-party DJ sets. "Congratulations L.A. Times, you've discovered Amoeba Music," you might be groaning into your newspaper. Nice one. Now quit rolling your eyes and walk down the street from Amoeba into Lure, and check your expectations about Hollywood fist-pumping dance clubs at the door.

At Cherry and Martin, a three-artist show takes visitors back to school. But rather than educating us about anything, “Bush of Ghosts” treats the pranks students play as an art form. No one does this better than Nathan Mabry, whose life-size bronze sculpture of a cowboy astride a bucking bronco would be right at home in any collection of Western art, except that the cowboy's head has been replaced by that of a ferocious monster, its fang-filled mouth open wide. Nearly 12 feet tall, Mabry's statue makes Frederic Remington look as hip - and significantly more ambitious - than many young sculptors, who seem to want nothing more than for their work to be accepted as "unmonumental.