Lee Tamahori's "Once Were Warriors" and Mathieu Kassovitz' "La Haine"

Two of my favorite films from the 90's from directors who after these breakout films, had bigger budgets but never created work of such quality.

David Alfaro Siqueiros "Echo of a Scream"

Time and time again, reading about world situations, or thinking about mankind, my mind always conjures this image up.

Wangechi Mutu

I can't even begin to discuss what her work does for me. First, there's the classicism of form, composition, that draws you to the work from across a museum floor; the strength of her use and unique quality of color and paint, sometimes reminiscent of surrealism; the redefining and recontextualizing of the female form and symbols, new perspectives and stories; then up close the discovery of the collages, and the layers of meaning they add to the form at large; the violence and gut-wrenching truths, the grotesque, the majesty. There's one of her works hanging at the Museum of Modern Art right now in the "The Modern Myth: Drawing Mythologies in Modern Times" show. One must experience her work in person to appreciate its full capacity. It's a moving experience, one that you can't take your eyes off of. I look forward to when New York City hosts a large retrospective of her work.

Arvo Pärt "Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten"

Aurel Schmidt's "Master of the Universe/Flexmaster 3000"; The Whitney Biennial 2010

Aurel Schmidt's "Master of the Universe/Flexmaster 3000" (above) is my favorite, distorting mythology and form, among just a tiny handful from this year's Whitney Biennial, which was otherwise crap. A lifeless display of what happens when MFA-wielding artists are safely selected among those in the insider's institutional name game club. Themes were so out of touch with the times we're living in, and so conceptual, that the works required more background reading than anything else... we could've easily have just read an essay about what the work wanted to achieve, without experiencing the work itself. In fact that would've been preferable instead of the distraction of going through the vast spaces of the museum, and seeing the work merely as wasted real estate, imagining the money that it took to support the work's space in the museum. And although sometimes conceptual and abstract art can be interesting because of meticulous production value...here...what production value? Art that exists only within its own community has developed a language for insiders only, stripped of the experiential aspect of art. Not that it has to appeal to the masses on the other end of the spectrum, but there needs to be a serious re-evaluation of where the art world is going. Because right now? Boring. Pointless.