January 3, 2025. (From a hotel room)

In 2008, I saw a Martin Kippenberger show at MOCA that changed my life. The part that moved me was his collection of hotel room drawings. At the time, I was editing theLobby.com, a travel blog about art and culture, funded by Starwood Hotels and Resorts, now Marriott. Every morning I would awaken at 7am and edit short pieces about an interesting show, attraction or natural wonder nearby a hotel. I would also search for a short ambient user-generated video clip to accompany the text. Then I would publish them. Starwood had thousands of hotels around the world, in destinations I often had never heard of, and I dreamed of visiting them all from my back bedroom of my rotting shack in Venice, California. My beloved friend and mentor was dying of cancer, but this daily travel research helped transcend the sobering reality of driving her to treatment, and everything else that happened in between. I remember telling my long-time producer and lifelong friend, Cynthia, that I was so grateful to have a remote job so I could live and be present during this difficult time. I never really thought about art in hotels until I saw the Kippenberger pieces, but it was around this time that I became more engaged in contemporary art. I had created a blog, objetsmart.com, based around a Roy Lichtenstein paper plate that my other friends had in their library. I was just obsessed with this paper plate. They had framed it and it sat at the back of a shelf. No one seemed to notice it, but me. It was a Lichtenstein, but it was a paper plate. It was an objet d’art, but it was meant to be used. But once soiled, it would be worthless. So it was never used, but framed, and it became a piece of art. I called this idea, an objetsmart. Being curious, I began to look for other artistic uses of common objects. When I stumbled upon the Kippenberger show at MOCA, my mind was ignited.

Hotel-Hotel / Hotel-Hotel-Hotel / No Drawing No Cry.

Christopher Knight described the Kippenberger show like this: “By contrast, Kippenberger’s modest drawings made on simple sheets of hotel stationery are his most sustained body of work, representing the disconnected nomadism of contemporary art-life in myriad ways — poignant, perverse, matter-of-fact and daydreamy. During his brief career he lived and worked in Hamburg, Florence, Berlin, Paris, Cologne, Los Angeles, Seville, Madrid, Frankfurt and Vienna. Which is to say, everywhere and nowhere. The solitariness of looking at scores of small hotel doodles keys right into their disengaged motifs.”

Kippenberger’s hotel works have been a part of my consciousness ever since, often traveling in hotels alone, collecting and painting on stationary, writing 1 or 2 sentence stories, usually with an unnamed narrator that talks to a character named Kippenberger. Kippenberger is droll and usually monosyllabic. I mention him because I am currently in a hotel with bedside stationary trying to capture my goals for 2025. On the first page of the pad, I wrote, “I don’t want to be so transactional.”

A year ago today, I went to the dentist for an emergency procedure. I had broken yet another tooth on a trip and it needed to be fixed. I remembered this fact because in my photo library there is a picture of the rainbow outside my dentist’s office. I’ve lived in LA most of my life and I often joke, “I never see rainbows.” Social media has become what it has because of rainbows, but while I’ve looked at thousands of other people’s rainbows, it wasn’t until a year ago that I was able to take a photograph of an LA rainbow. I was numb at the time from the anesthesia, but I was so thrilled that I finally had my own rainbow. So I took pictures as I drove across town.

Shot from the dentist, January 3, 2024

Shot from Wilshire Blvd, heading east

Shot from the corner of my friends block.

The day before I had taken a photo of the Lichtenstein paper plate. I had taken many better photos of it before, but I took one anyhow on January 2. I now own the plate, but it no longer represents just my curiosity about art. In fact, it challenges me to think bigger, be bolder and create more interactivity and thought. It’s my first objetsmart, but definitely not my last.

It is now a year later and as I sit here reflecting on 2025, and what 2024 offered or in many ways, didn’t, I am reminded that looking back on a year as a whole is a complicated matter. I intended to do a summary of milestones and experiences when I started writing this, but I only made it as far as 3 days in my iPhoto library. Rainbows, Kippenberger, Lichtenstein. All my favorite things, but all things from the past.

Instead I think I’ll end this with a photograph from this morning of a painting I made yesterday inspired by a Brian Eno “Oblique Strategies” card. The card read, “Abandon normal instruments” so I went into my shed, took out my spray paint and loaded it down on the canvas until it reacted, painted so more and watched the canvas make its own art.

Hi 2025. I’ll try not to be transactional.