It's a probing question: Is realism relevant? That's what Conner Contemporary is asking with its season opener, which includes paintings from Erik Thor Sandberg, Nathaniel Rogers, and Katie Miller. To go by these works, the answer, clearly, is yes. These paintings show an amazing handling of paint and an astute understanding of how to [...]

For every punk revival, there is a post-punk revival.
If the last post-punk craze, in the first half of this decade, was steeped in acts like Joy Division and Josef K, then their headier cousins—Wire, Minutemen—fascinate the current crop of bands blending the forward-thinking and the visceral, many of whom are staples of Los Angeles' all-ages [...]