Artists

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.

For decades, gallery owners in California have wished that the state's Resale Royalty Act of 1976, which provides artists with 5% of the sales price of artworks when they are resold under certain conditions, would just go away. While some dealers follow the law and pay the royalty to artists, others do not. But it's hard to track what artists may be owed in either case, given the difficulty of getting the galleries to disclose information on their sales. Now, working to force some disclosures as well as recover money, the foundation of the late abstract painter Sam Francis is the lead plaintiff in class-action lawsuits filed Tuesday against nine galleries in Northern and Southern California.

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.

One of the first big-budget Hollywood films to confront the Vietnam War, "The Deer Hunter," showed captive American soldiers tortured and forced to engage in a grisly game of Russian roulette. The film's grim depiction of young Americans' loss of innocence stirred raw emotion in audiences in 1978, three years after the war's end. Ned Tanen, then the president of Universal Pictures, felt the intensity at a preview showing in Detroit. "The screening was a blood bath," Tanen said.

This may be the information age, but more specifically, it's the mash-up moment.  Images, sounds, words -- all are retrieved instantly from our collective digital memory bank by artists and advertisers alike, shaken, stirred and spilled back out. In the day when collage really did involve scissors and glue, the discontinuities it invoked had more power to jolt and disarm. Think Höch and Heartfield. Now, makers are mixers and the visual fabric of the everyday is a busy, buzzing patchwork.

Who's afraid of the big, broad biennial? Not Dan Cameron, who organized ambitious exhibition events like Prospect New Orleans before becoming chief curator at the Orange County Museum of Art last year. Now, his first big group show in his new job is shaping up to be a global mash-up shaped by seismic geopolitical undercurrents. Called the California-Pacific Triennial, the show features 32 artists from 15 countries that border the Pacific Ocean. This show replaces the California Biennial, a regular museum attraction that often promised more than it delivered, and the new project has a more sustainable every-three-years schedule.

Three of four artists on the Museum of Contemporary Art's board of trustees have now resigned. The dire action is a warning as much as a protest. It shows how trustees critically important to MOCA's future are being marginalized. In commentary about the museum, a crucial fact of its widely celebrated, sometimes fractious history is often forgotten: MOCA was founded by artists. In 1979, a large and steadily expanding group around acclaimed abstract painter Sam Francis determined that it was long past time for a museum dedicated to the presentation and study of recent art. Soon they drew an influential array of civic leaders into their orbit.

Most of the people I know don't have regular jobs. They're writers, actors, musicians, artists, photographers and filmmakers. They also are middle-class taxpayers who carry mortgages and send their kids to public school. They're used to hard times. They've always lived project to project, rather than paycheck to paycheck. They've learned how to cut costs, eliminate excess and wait out the dry spells. "I'm good at this," one actor friend said.

The artists who installed the life-size "sunbathers" in an empty lot in downtown Los Angeles said they were pleased with the public's reactions - and may even have plans for other abandoned parcels around town. "We're getting people to see things," said Calder Greenwood, 32, a New York native working in Los Angeles as a multimedia artist. "It takes what's otherwise invisible, and it gets people to notice. It pointed out the fact that the lot was big and empty. " His partner in the installation, who asked to remain anonymous, has lived in L.A. for two decades and has been doing similar street art since 2000.