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We took in the executive gala celebration of the opening of "Thing" at the Hammer (corner of Westwood & Wilshire Blvds) and found the sculpture on the second floor well worth the wine, cheese sticks, sandwiches and flavorburst canapes on the first floor. They were both standard fare, with a couple of real standouts. Ok ok the art surpassed the munchies but both are requirements of an interesting life.
Attempts to try describing art and what it all means are usually pretty silly unless you go whole hog into it at length, which is often pretty silly too. Let's just say there was one piece so huge, so surprising, and yet so diminutive (and so orange) that it alone will be worth the trouble you take to find free street parking north of the Mormon temple and walk the five blocks to the Hammer. Which is exactly what we did not do, but it wouldn't have taken any longer than spiralling downward on a concrete ramp into the bowels of the earth and then riding a tiny elevator nearly to the very surface of Trantor, where we emerged into a higher level of the parking lot, then finally issued forth onto a carpet along with all the black-clad, earringed, coiffed, and besuited individuals, enjoyed wine, art, and song, and finally beat our way out and back up to the planet surface against the oncoming art-hungering crowd, to a cloverleaf shuffle of freeway entrances and exits, bopping our way bulletlike to a distant concert only to be greeted with a cryptic sign on the small chapel, "latecomers may be seated through door 34," a door which at that time and on this plane, patently did not exist. Maybe we ought to initiate a close-read study of the book of Revelations.
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