Barbara Bloom

Artist David Salle once de scribed his colleague Barbara Bloom as "the perfect hostess." Surprisingly enough, Bloom concedes that Salle's characterization is on the money. "Visual graciousness and trying to make people feel comfortable are central to the notion of femininity we were all raised with, and I use those things in my work," the New York-based artist says in a recent phone interview.

Artist David Salle once de scribed his colleague Barbara Bloom as "the perfect hostess." Surprisingly enough, Bloom concedes that Salle's characterization is on the money. "Visual graciousness and trying to make people feel comfortable are central to the notion of femininity we were all raised with, and I use those things in my work," the New York-based artist says in a recent phone interview.

Barbara Bloom won the 1988 artists-under-40 Aperto award at the Venice Biennale with the installation re-created here. It begins with offset printed halftone photos of psychics bending or teletransporting objects. Tiny and faded, these have the irrefutable authority of secret FBI files. Mounted below each are eye-strain size plaques bearing minuscule arcane texts.

Barbara Bloom won the 1988 artists-under-40 Aperto award at the Venice Biennale with the installation re-created here. It begins with offset printed halftone photos of psychics bending or teletransporting objects. Tiny and faded, these have the irrefutable authority of secret FBI files. Mounted below each are eye-strain size plaques bearing minuscule arcane texts.

Artistic Gift: The Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation has given $50,000 each to four museums for the purchase of an artwork by a living artist. The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles used its gift to buy Barbara Bloom's mixed-media installation, "The Reign of Narcissism." Other recipients are the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Menil Collection in Houston.

Overcrowding in California Youth Authority institutions should be eased by funding diversified community-based centers rather than building additional high-security training schools and camps, a nonprofit health research group contended Monday in a presentation to the Los Angeles Children's Commission.

Pablo Neruda remarked that "a bibliophile of little means is likely to suffer often. Books don't slip from his hands but fly past him through the air as high as birds, as high as prices." Expect a lot of that at next weekend's Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which brings together publishers from around the world. Many debut or announce big, beautiful books on L.A. artists, including Jorge Pardo, Jason Rhoades, Tim Hawkinson, Barbara Bloom, Frances Stark, Doug Aitken and Pat O'Neill.

Wedding bells are ringing today in "Port Charles," the ratings-challenged ABC soap opera that has left virtually no plot device unexplored in an increasingly desperate struggle to find an audience. Since spinning off from genre heavyweight "General Hospital" in 1997, the show has gone from dealing with some of the familiar soap-opera motifs, such as illicit affairs, evil twins and split personalities, into strange new realms inhabited by demons, angels and even vampires, but to little avail.

The heads of the Legislature's two budget committees Thursday supported efforts to defeat Proposition 120, the $450-million prison bond issue on Tuesday's ballot, saying the state can't afford it because of a looming budget deficit. "The prisons are breaking our backs and breaking our banks," said Assemblyman John Vasconcellos (D-San Jose), chairman of the Assembly Ways and Means Committee. Sen. Alfred E.

"The revival of Conceptual Art in the last five years can be traced to some extent to CalArts graduates who moved to New York," said journalist Richard B. Woodward in a recent article in the New York Times. "CalArts students have swarmed over both coasts like a pack of elite professional soldiers." Like the Bauhaus in the '30s, Los Angeles' California Institute of the Arts revolutionized art school in the '80s. A small private academy located in the Valencia area, CalArts took higher learning out of the ivory tower and into the marketplace.

Former Sheriff John Duffy and homicide Lt. John Tenwolde have been sued by three longtime Duffy supporters for failing to repay $43,560 in personal loans and interest used to cover legal costs for both men in a 1986 lawsuit. William Cowling II, Charles Cono and Barbara Bloom, the wife of the late Arthur Bloom, each filed identical lawsuits earlier this month demanding that Duffy and Tenwolde repay three $12,000 loans, plus 10% interest for each of the past two years.

What is a house? Two young architects posed that question to a group of artists and challenged them to answer it by conjuring up their ideal versions of a house. In this way, they hoped to explore the connections between art and architecture.