YouTube/HellflowersinLA

The artist in question

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Paul Abramson, the UCLA psychology professor who helped spearhead our sex issue (on newsstands tomorrow), has a YouTube channel called Hellflowers in L.A., in which he examines various crazy characters in our fair city.

After the jump, check out one of his videos, on a woman who creates paintings of penises. Yes, penises. (We did say he helped with the sex issue.)

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Courtesy Hammer Museum

Rhys Ernst's Secret Men's Club Moment #133, 2009

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Great video is slated to screen Valentine's Day at the Hammer, and the inspired My Barbarian collective is moving into Human Resources' Chinatown space for a monthlong residency, which can only bring good things.

5. Art or lawn furniture?
Diana Molzan's painting Untitled, shaped like a table and patterned like cheap upholstery, feels cozy even though it's on canvas, and Math Bass's Body No Body Body series of striped canvases draped over easels or sawhorses is like fossilized mammals dressed as lawn furniture. The other work in Overduin and Kite's group exhibition "Il Regalo," which means "the gift," is strangely familiar and comforting, too, even if it's impossible to articulate exactly what it's about. 6693 Sunset Blvd., Hlywd.; through March 23. (323) 464-3600, overduinandkite.com.

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Tai Fauci

Patrick Breen and Willie Garson star as two ill-fated, out-of-work actors trying their hand at the art world in Whole Day Down

​How do you know something is art? When it's in a gallery? Is a toilet seat in a gallery art? How about a web series about a toilet seat? Or a paragraph made entirely of questions?

Whole Day Down, the new, hilariously bizarre web series created by writer-actor Patrick Breen, whom you've seen in everything, and writer-producer-editor Tai Fauci (Palisades Pool Party), does not answer this question, but it does have fun with the fact that half the punch of art these days seems to be its fierce decree that IT IS ART even if everything about it seems to defy that definition.

Whole Day Down follows two doomed (and I mean satanically doomed) out-of-work actors: Willie, played by Willie Garson (White Collar, Sex & the City) and Patrick, played by Breen, who decide to try their hand curating art shows in an effort to make money and make a difference. Breen's pregnant wife, Nadine (Elisa Donovan) bribes her inappropriately over-devoted daddy to give them the gallery space one day a week. And so begins the story of lovable losers, fascist art critics, unrequited love and the impending apocalypse.

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D3: Ali Prosch, Megan Cotts, Brica Wilcox gearing up for 1980 Special Edition, their Feb. 11-12 event

​Ever find yourself toting around boxes of unknown childhood memories? Hey, sentimentality can be burdensome. Maybe that's why those New Year's Eve celebrations where people just chuck things into the garbage are so popular. The names of ex-boyfriends and other heartstring-ripping past-year traumas heaved into a rubbish bin, leaving you with no trace of the thing lost.

But, as artists Megan Cotts, Ali Prosch and Brica Wilcox are keen to note, "Destruction is impossible."

Why is that? Since we're all experts in thermodynamics ... oh, wait, we're not. OK, so here's the deal: Energy can't be created or destroyed, only transformed from one thing into another. Basically, it's like when you go all crazy and bust up a mirror, you're not left with nothing, you're left with a huge pile of shards of glass.

And when you're dealing with emotionally burdensome objects, something left over can be a big problem.

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Photo by Calvin Lee

Main course inspired by Ed Ruscha's painting LACMA on Fire

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"You screwed up," chef John Rivera Sedlar told Getty curator Andrew Perchuk in the months before Pacific Standard Time began. The sprawling, Getty-funded celebration of postwar SoCal art should have included food. But Perchuk, already working to facilitate exhibitions at 60-plus institutions and organizing his own show, felt he had plenty to worry about besides appetizers and entrees. Later, though, after the frenzy surrounding PST's launch subsided, he decided Sedlar was right: PST should include food.

After all, didn't gallerist Everrett Ellin open the Chez La Vie café beside his original West Hollywood gallery in 1958, to serve the art-viewing public? Didn't dealer Virginia Dwan install working fountains by sculptor Jean Tinguely in homes of collectors before hosting a progressive dinner, plying guests with Champagne as they bussed from house to house? And hasn't Al's Café, the 4-month-long pop-up restaurant artist Al Ruppersberg staged in 1969, where he sold plates of art rather than food, become almost mythic for the way it made conceptual art a social experience?

The official PST menu, which debuted Saturday at Sedlar's year-old West Hollywood restaurant Playa and will be available to all diners starting Tuesday, Feb. 7, is far sleeker, honed and literal in its approach to food-as-art than anything I imagine Ruppersberg, Ellin or even the posh Dwan served when they dabbled in dining years ago.

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Courtesy of Corey Helford Gallery

The Cat Carrier by Shag/Josh Agle

​"When [Mad Men] first started, all of my friends, everyone who knows me, said, 'You've got to watch it. You'll love the costumes and the sets,'" says Josh Agle, the artist best known as Shag.

Agle, though, wasn't necessarily interested in checking out the mid-20th-century costumes and interiors that mark AMC's hit series. And when he finally walked in on his wife watching Mad Men, it was the stories and characters that sucked him into the show.

"I hope that's the same thing with my paintings," he says by phone. "They might be set in the '50s or '60s or '70s, but the real content is in the characters and stories they're telling as opposed to the window dressing, the way they are dressed and the furniture that they're sitting on."

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The Costacos Brothers

Big Game James Worthy

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Do we still have the old jock and nerd stereotypes of yore? Swishy art nerds would never be caught on the jock side of the tracks, or vice versa, would they?

Well, with Country Club and the Mondrian's joint exhibition of the Costacos Brothers' fantastical sports lithographs from the 1980s, the jocks have invaded the art gallery.

Former Laker "Big Game James" Worthy stands Perry Mason-esque, suited up, ready to take on the courtroom; Dodger-era Kirk Gibson, decked out like a cross between "Crocodile" Dundee and Jesse Ventura, prepares to hunt pitchers like game animals; and Michael Jordan dunks the fucking moon, obviously.

For the nerdier thirty-something art folks like us, these are definitely the posters that stood watch over the kids who beat us up in middle school as they slept comfortably. But, now, nearly 30 years later, there's an undeniable sense of artistic wonderment in these seemingly unlikely objets d'art.

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Marissa Gluck

L.A. Times cartoonist Paul Conrad's Chain Reaction sculpture from 1991

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A controversy has been bubbling over Paul Conrad's anti-nuclear war sculpture in Santa Monica, Chain Reaction, and the latest fallout may spell the end of the 26-foot tall mushroom cloud near the city's Civic Center.

With the deterioration of the steel, fiberglass and copper sculpture, mostly due to the sea air and sun, Santa Monica's Arts Commission and Public Art Committee have recommended the city deaccession the five-and-a-half-ton piece rather than attempt to preserve it. Citing public-safety concerns, the city erected a temporary fence around the sculpture in June.

Installed in 1991, the sculpture was a gift to the city by the artist, paid for by an anonymous donor for $250,000. It was supposed to have been made of bronze, which tends to require little maintenance and resists the elements over time. Instead, the piece was constructed with a stainless steel internal frame, a Fiberglas core and copper tubing for the chain links.

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Courtesy Mor Lovehours

Mike Kelley memorial on Tipton Way, photographed Wednesday afternoon

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Mike Kelley was "arguably" the most important L.A. artist of his generation, "arguably" the one who changed the world's perception of Los Angeles, even "arguably" the most important contemporary artist according to obituaries and remembrances published yesterday, after news of the 57-year-old artist's death, reportedly by suicide.

A subdued version of that argument -- over how much exactly Kelley mattered and why -- was playing out last night near 11 p.m. at the top of Tipton Way. There, in an abandoned driveway blocks from Kelley's home in Highland Park, artists had begun to construct an unofficial, makeshift memorial.

"He was one of the main reasons I moved to L.A.," said painter Greta Svalberg. "He was a rebel, and he was famous."

"For me too," said artist Dani Tull, who lives nearby and knew Kelley well. "After graduate school, it was either New York or L.A." Tull, who finished school in the early 1990s, had written down names of all the artists working here that interested him: Mike Kelley, Jim Shaw, Raymond Pettibon, Paul McCarthy. "This list of mavericks and freaks had an allure that seemed exotic," compared to New York.

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© Eugenia P. Butler Estate

Eugenia Bulter Jr. showed Electric Cord Piece (1967) at her mother's gallery

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The best art this week is all in Hollywood, where major-leaguers look like superheroes and an eccentric 1960s gallerist makes a thrilling comeback.

5. Sunglass art
Artist Alex Israel, who makes surreal installations out of Hollywood props, also designs sunglasses for his L.A.-centric brand Freeways Eyewear (John Baldessari's quote "I will not look at any more boring art" is on a new pair). Israel's new Abbot Kinney mural isn't a sunglass ad but, intentionally, it has that crisp, seductive feeling of a beachside advertisement minus a brand name. Will you be able to spot it as art? And does it matter if you can't? 1212-C Abbot Kinney Blvd., Venice; up indefinitely. (310) 426-8040, vsf.la.

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