With two exhibitions opening, three concerts, and a couple of special events, we thought it might be helpful to lay it all out for you so you might plan accordingly.
Tonight the weekend kicks off with our weekly free Jazz at LACMA concert. Vocalist Janis Mann will take the stage at 6 pm. Don’t forget the museum is free after 5 pm, so you can sneak in some time in the galleries while you’re here. If you’re a member, you can also see John Baldessari: Pure Beauty—it’s open to members only, today and tomorrow.
By the way, even if you’re not at the museum today, you ought to check in with our twitter account. Artist Adrienne Ferrari is taking over our feed all day for a performance as part of our Cell Phone Stories project.
Saturday at 5 pm the salsa group Opa Opa will play a free concert in Hancock Park as part of our Latin Sounds series. Then, at 8 pm—after the galleries close to the public—we’re having our annual Late Night Art event, Video on the Loose: Freewaves and 20 Years of Media Arts. The nonprofit organization Freewaves has assembled more than twenty experimental videos which will be screened on the BP Grand Entrance all night. Tickets are just $10 and they get you into Pure Beauty too.
Sunday Pure Beauty officially opens to the public. So if you didn’t see it as a member and you didn’t see it as part of Saturday’s event, this’ll be a good time too. Baldessari himself will join exhibition curator Leslie Jones in conversation at 2 pm inside BCAM. The event is free but you need a ticket, which will be available first-come, first-served at the Box Office one hour before the program starts.
Also opening on Sunday is EATLACMA: The Fruit of LACMA, which was assembled by the artist collective Fallen Fruit. In addition to the exhibition in the Ahmanson Building, there are also a number of artist-created gardens all around campus. The artists will be on campus from 5–8 pm, enjoying an evening picnic in Hancock Park—BYOP (bring your own picnic).
At 6 pm you can also drop into the Bing Theater for a performance of the USC/Thornton Polish Music Center’s Chopin Marathon. As with the other concerts this weekend, this one is free too!
Scott Tennent
Unframed The LACMA Blog 
What is going on with the mindless, irrelevant, annoying, rude, boring tweets by Adrienne Ferrari? It looks like @lacma has be hijacked by some one who must hate the assignment, the museum, its members, and art in general.
Being that this is the only place on the LACMA site that both mentions Cell Phone Stories and has a comment field I just want to say: impressive concept, terrible execution. Steve Fagan’s post on the project (http://www.lacma.org/art/1271359895048.html) is self-indulgent but ambitious, an undertaking worth excitement.
If the goal was to “use mobile phone technology to circulate thought-provoking narrative works about the museum and its audience,” well, it’s succeeding in that I am an audience member who feels provoked enough to search out a way to engage with the museum, but entirely for the wrong reasons. I’m not thinking about the museum, about the narrative of visiting a museum (and I love museums, I would love to see an artistically well-captured museum visit mediated through technology reach a significant audience), about the potential of interactive media or even about the frustration of disruptive technology. I feel no connection to Adrienne, have no empathy for her frustration with her (apparently) first attempt at tweeting, have no sympathy for her defensive ‘Well if you don’t like it that’s fine, I’m not here to entertain you’ attitude.
“Who is Adrienne Ferrari? Has she ever used Twitter before? Why on earth would anyone choose her to launch this series?” Those are the questions being provoked.
One of my professional duties involves live tweeting from time sensitive events to a mercurial and insatiable audience. I know what endurance tweeting looks like from the outside and feels like from the inside. Aside from pulling back the curtain on power consumption and framing one’s time around recharging today’s tweets didn’t approach anything close to endurance tweeting.
Perhaps the disruptive and belligerent takeover of LACMA’s Twitter account today can be framed in a redeemable artistic manner but as both a narrative experience and as endurance Twittering it fails in a truly remarkable fashion.
I’ve been a big fan of LACMA even before I moved to LA, and while Cell Phone Stories is a neat concept, I have to say I’m tremendously disappointed with the “hijacking” of LACMA’s twitter feed today. I really don’t understand why you picked the person you did, because regardless of the project, @LACMA represents the museum and LACMA brand — what should have been cool and innovative is instead obnoxious and off-putting.
I’ve unfollowed LACMA’s twitter feed for now, and will have to seriously consider whether I want to follow it again or not. I doubt that was the intention of this project.
So if you happen to continue this project in a similar manner, I would strongly recommend 1) getting a separate account and cross-promoting (within reason) on @LACMA so as to not alienate followers and degrade your brand further, and 2) actually picking people who know what they’re doing and know how to restrict themselves to 140 characters or less, & engage with people constructively via twitter.
Thanks all for your comments. We’re taking all the feedback in. Bronwyn – we’re back to our regularly scheduled programming on Twitter so I hope we haven’t seen the last of you.