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Death Triumphs (Frank O’Hara Lives)
TV’s Mad Men are reading Frank O’Hara, and now the Hammer Museum’s current show, “Oranges and Sardines,” alludes in both title and theme to one of O’Hara’s poems, “Why I Am Not a Painter.” This isn’t...
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Working Stiffs
“This place has more failed artists and intellectuals than the Third Reich.” Don Draper was speaking of Sterling-Cooper, but his words could just as well apply to another cauldron of mid-century modern...
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Bert Cooper’s Freaky Octopus Picture
Mad Men is one of the few TV series in which the creators know something about art (unlike, say, Work of Art). Not only are the Sterling Cooper offices a wet dream of mid-century modern design, but one...
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The Mad Woman Behind “Mad Men”
“Fear stimulates my imagination.” —Don Draper “Don’t be afraid! Paint the door green!” —Dorothy Draper The less-is-more modernism of TV’s Mad Men is only half the show, visually. The series’ domestic...
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In “Mad Men” and Film, NHMLA Is Always That Other Museum
The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County has appeared in a staggering number of movies and TV shows, though rarely as a museum and almost never as itself. It more often counterfeits the...
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Midway in the Journey of Our Life…
Don Draper is 40 and reading Dante in Hawaii. To the conspiracy theory wing of Mad Men exegesis may I propose a connection to the art of Scottish artist-poet Ian Hamilton Finlay? Consider: Finlay came...
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Save the Pereira? Seriously?!?
There is no dog so ugly that somebody doesn’t love it. Case in point: the movement to save LACMA’s mixed-up east campus. A new Facebook page, “Save and Restore the Original LACMA Buildings,” seeks to...
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