It should come as no surprise to anyone who regularly reads this blog that I love popup books. While researching them recently, I stumbled onto a new genre, animated popup books. I've selected four videos for you. Prepare yourself for magic.

In this enchanting video, produced as a trailer for...

I am the proverbial kid at Christmas every time a shipment of art books arrives here at Offramp. Writing about art books and stocking them for the bookstore makes it seem like the holidays year round. I've compiled this list (see slideshow below) of our best-selling titles hoping some of...

Before I tell you about an amazing new Joseph Cornell box/book, I want to talk briefly about art fairs again. In my ongoing quest to get to the bottom line about whether or not participating in fairs is a money-making proposition, I recently had what I thought was a Eureka...

If your need for the macabre this Halloween goes beyond cute kids in costumes and Hallmark notions of creepy, this animated look at two giants of art history, Hieronymus Bosch and Brueghel the Elder, should transport you to those depraved depths you crave.

We'll start with a jaunty video by...

Art. Books. Art books. Book art. I have lived most of my adult life near the intersection of these two worlds -- as an artist, diarist, voracious reader, art-gallery/art-book-store director and blogger about art and books. You could say it is my happy place -- and for the last two...

In a week that has strongly reinforced my belief that large international art fairs, however else you want to defend them, are the worst possible, most sterile environments ever conceived for viewing art -- the amazing book that I now have before me, Orhan Pamuk's The Innocence of...

According to Wikipedia, the term "kaleidoscope" was coined in 1817 by its Scottish inventor, Sir David Brewster, while he was performing experiments on light polarization. Brewster arranged for manufacture of his invention, intended as a science tool. The kaleidoscope was an instant hit -- over 200,000 sold in...

We see a naked young woman lying on the floor in the corner of a sparsely furnished room. Generously sprinkled on the floor all around her is a white powdery substance. As the young woman begins to rise she turns back to look at the black silhouette her body has...

Los Angeles artist Patssi Valdez has gained international attention in the last few years, primarily from her early performance work as a member of the group Asco. Asco was recognized in a major exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2011, Asco: Elite of the...

Ever since our prehistoric ancestors first picked up chunks of limestone and carved crude female figurines some 20,000 years ago, we humans have been trying to depict the human form in three dimensions using everything from wood, stone, clay and bronze, to modern synthetic materials such as silicone, polyurethane, fiberglass,...

I was skeptical when I saw the title of Flavio Febbraro's handsome volume, How to Read Erotic Art. That's all we need, I thought -- more dry, cerebral artspeak to take all the fun out of erotic art. So I was very pleased to discover that the texts...

For this week's videos I went to various video sites and typed in "paint." A theme quickly emerged: paint in motion. This first video, Tall Painting, shows a painting by Holton Rower in progress as cup after cup after cup of multi-colored paints are poured on top of a two-tiered...

TASCHEN has had its way with me again. This time it's Paris: Portrait of a City, a voluptuous oversized volume of photographs of the city of my dreams, a visual feast covering 150 years of Parisian history and culture that put me in a prolonged trance-like state. Glancing at my...

I was a practicing artist for 15 years. During 10 of those years, I worked at the LA Municipal Art Gallery, a 10,000 square foot venue that exhibited a never-ending parade of contemporary art. I was relatively young and didn't have the self-confidence to give voice to the questions in...

I recently read an LA Times article about a public feud between artist Damien Hirst and British art critic Julian Spalding, the latter of whom had written a short book, Con Art -- Why You Should Sell Your Damien Hirsts While You Can. I thought it might make...

I don't know whether to love or hate this book for being so inspiring. Many times while reading it, I had the impulse to close my gallery, stop writing this blog, and return to making art. Martin Gayford's A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney chronicles discussions between...

If I had to define my mission as a gallery director and blogger about all things art-related, it would be to put the visual back into Visual Art. Rarely am I interested in conceptual art where the visual is secondary, non-existent, or in a state of forced servitude to an...

Creative Block. We've all had it. I'm trying to work through it as I write this sentence -- negative thoughts, distractions, rationalizations, avoidance and procrastination all dance before me, trying to get me to do anything but write. It's a beautiful day. I should be outdoors gardening, not hunched over...

It was the era of the parisienne, the professional French beauty, famous worldwide for her looks. Whole lives were devoted to it. Some went so far as to have their skin painted or enameled, a practice which sometimes led to facial paralysis, blood poisoning and even death. One social observer...

This week I want to spotlight a book that dovetails neatly with the current zeitgeist in the Los Angeles art world, a spirit of time and place that I believe is largely a result of the Getty's city-wide Pacific Standard Time initiative. Taschen's fabulous photography book, Los Angeles,...