Whipped Cream Difficulties

The LAT has a piece on the “Small Gift Los Angeles” exhibition in Santa Monica.

Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Sanrio, the event will include food trucks, miniature golf and a pop-up shop. The main draw is an art exhibition with nearly a dozen installation rooms and about 100 pieces by the likes of Paul Frank and Gary Baseman. For crafty types, the Japanese artist Naoshi will be teaching a workshop in how to render Hello Kitty with colored sand.

The link is worth checking out, especially for the included pictures. I find “Hello Topiary” a little scary, to be honest, but “Fishy Greetings” is kind of nifty.

Rotating 180 degrees away from Sanrio, the Guardian has an article on an exhibition in Berlin of sculptures confiscated by the Nazis. The sculptures in question were considered lost after the war, but were recently dug up during excavation for a new building.

These particular sculptures were apparently part of the Nazi campaign against “degenerate art”, and were included in the infamous “Entartete Kunst” exhibition. I’ve been fascinated by that exhibition since I first read about it in (of all places) Charles Willeford’s The Burnt Orange Heresy (not a spoiler: “Entartete Kunst” is only mentioned in passing). Somewhere in my collection I even have Degenerate Art, the catalog from the L.A. County Museum of Art’s attempt to recreate the exhibition.