Price Retrospective, Dixon New Work
(Slow Breaking Art News) This week friends of Happy and Ken Price (1935–2012) and fans of the art will attend the LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) retrospective of Ken’s work on Wednesday, Sept. 12 at 6 pm. According to LACMA, the exhibit will feature one hundred objects “from his luminously glazed ovoid forms of the 1960s to the mottled, molten-like slumps that he had been creating in the years just before his death.”
The piece above shown with Ken in Paul O’Connor’s photograph of the artist for Taos Portraits, was apparently flawed and Ken destroyed it. At the close of an interview in Horse Fly, published in 1999, he responded to a question about the role of authenticity in an artist’s work. 
(Pictures of Price objects throughout pilfered from LACMA’s site.)
“I think it’s important to make authentic work, and the best way to do it is to care deeply about what you’re doing. Authentic means real, genuine, and true. It means making work that’s valid. It’s up to each individual to figure out how this is done. One way to be valid is to try to make work that reflects your own beliefs, memories, fears, dreams, and fantasies. This doesn’t mean necessarily making yourself the subject of the work.
“Individual experience may be limited, but it’s specific, and I think it’s easier to be true with specifics than it is with generalities. If you could be faithful to you own point of view, who knows, it might end up being the perfect representation of our time and place. This is taking the small view, which puts you with the poets, not the philosophers. This position could insulate you from the art world trends and fashions. People ask, “Can you do your own thing and still be successful?” What I’m saying is that doing your own thing may be the only way to be successful.”
Ken’s wise words are well taken, regardless of your creative pursuit, words confirmed by the varied and wonderful objects he created.
The LACMA press states, “At the time of his passing, Price had been working closely with curator Stephanie Barron and architect Frank O. Gehry, Price’s longtime friend, to create and design LAMA’s retrospective, a fitting tribute to this exceptional, influential artist.”
The show continues at LACMA from September 16, 2012 through January 6, 2013. Then the show travels to the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. So you can see it more than once but the subsequent shows might contain fewer objects.
In other Taos Art News, Gallery 203 featured the new work by abstract expressionist Tom Dixon at an opening on Saturday, Sept. 8th. Photographed here in his studio by Dennis Hopper,
the well-known abstract expressionist sold several pieces and confessed that he’s been buying back some of his early “pocket art” from folks “who need the money” (as he did) . In a shocking confession, Tom admitted to the purchase of a cell phone “to keep in touch with my mother.” 
Dixon, who generally wears a jaunty fedora and day-old (?) beard is familiar to the customers of World Cup, a stone’s throw from his secluded studio. Indeed, here’s a rare view of the artist sans chapeau.
BTW:We saw artist Jim Wagner at Tom’s opening. The long-time fisherman confessed to a problem with fatigue. But after a visit with consulting physician Dr. Kilgore, said, “He told me I wasn’t breathing right.” After learning how to breathe—all the way down—Wagner said he’s full of energy and working hard. Artist Peter Parks, just returned from a sabbatical in Seattle, attended the Dixon do, accompanied by the lovely Tanya, and looked fine, like Peter himself, too.