Newsletter: Essential Arts & Culture: Trump v. Shakespeare, LACMA in Venice, Beyonce’s think tank

I’m Carolina A. Miranda, arts and culture staff writer at the Los Angeles Times. Welcome to your weekly guide to everything happening in the arts in Southern California and beyond. Don’t miss the special bonus item: your Moment of “Hotel California.”

The Theater of Trump

Donald Trump‘s candidacy has been likened to a TV reality show. But perhaps it’s more like a work of theater — a work by William Shakespeare, to be exact. Times theater critic Charles McNulty looks for lessons in the works of the Bard, finding some interesting parallels in his Roman dramas. “To anyone bewildered by the eruptions of violence at the Trump rallies,” he writes, “‘Julius Caesar’ and ‘Coriolanus’ reveal just how easy it is to transform anxious citizens into mobs.” Et tu, indeed. Los Angeles Times

LACMA takes its proposed building to Venice

The architecture world is descending on Venice, Italy, for the 15th iteration of the Venice Architecture Biennale, organized by newly minted Pritzker Prize-winner Alejandro Aravena. Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne is on the ground with L.A. County Museum of Art director Michael Govan and architect Peter Zumthor (also a Pritzker recipient), who are in Venice showing off the latest version of the architect’s proposed LACMA redesign. Zumthor’s presentation of the model, writes Hawthorne, echoed the infamous words of water services engineer William Mulholland: “There it is: Take it or leave it, love it or hate it.” Los Angeles Times

Our woman in Havana

As U.S.-Cuban relations continue to thaw and travel to the island becomes easier, art world fascination with the region is mounting. Collectors, museum curators and gallery directors are flocking to the area to establish connections, look into possible exhibitions and acquire work. Reporter Deborah Vankin follows Selma Holo, the director of USC’s Fisher Museum of Art, on her art pilgrimage around Havana. Los Angeles Times

Actor John Cho, center, rehearses a scene with actors for Artists at Play, an Asian American theater group.

(Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times )

A theater project for Asian playwrights and actors

At a time when Hollywood is under fire for whitewashing Asian roles in cinema (such as actress Scarlett Johansson being selected to play a lead role in the manga-inspired flick “Ghost in the Shell”), the collective Artists at Play has been giving Asian playwrights and actors a chance to present their work. This weekend, the group is staging a reading — featuring actor John Cho — at the Pasadena Armory Center for the Arts. Los Angeles Times

A comic takes on the high cost of fashion

“Threadbare,” a new book by journalist Anne Elizabeth Moore, uses comics to explore a very difficult topic: the garment industry, one of the top employers of women on the planet, and one with a generally poor track record when it comes to wages and conditions. I spoke with Moore about why she chose to do investigative journalism in the comics format: “It’s about being able to depict the heretofore unimaginable,” she says. Los Angeles Times

In other news...

Galleries: The bankruptcy of L.A.’s Ace Gallery has been generating headlines in art publications — even more so now that a forensic accountant investigating the gallery’s finances has filed a lengthy status report with the court that documented financial irregularities by proprietor Doug Chrismas. The Art Newspaper

Theater: A complaint filed by actress Ann Colby Stocking with the California Department of Industrial Relations has the theater community abuzz over what actors should get paid in houses with 99 seats or fewer. Stocking’s complaint states that the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble in Los Angeles owes her back wages totaling more than $6,000. Under the law as it stands, union actors can volunteer their time for small theaters in exchange for stipends. Stocking says that she should be paid as an employee. @ This Stage magazine

Kasey Torres waits in line before the Beyonce concert at the Rose Bowl earlier this month.

(Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times )

The Beyhive: Beyoncé’s “Lemonade” album has generated think-pieces galore — including this thoughtful examination of the way in which the former teen pop star has found a way of creating work whose meanings can remain seductively elusive, by Times senior writer Lorraine Ali. Now the super-duper high-brow set is jumping into the fray, with recent essays from feminist theorist bell hooks and New Yorker critic Hilton Als. (The latter of which is thoroughly deconstructed, and partly refuted, by Julianne Escobedo Shepherd in The Muse.) A perfect marriage of the high-low.

Art history: Times art critic Christopher Knight is currently knee deep in a long read by T.J. Clark that examines the history behind Pablo Picasso‘s rarely discussed 1958 mural for UNESCO’s Paris headquarters, “The Fall of Icarus.” It is a work, writes Clark, that “aims to put the era of ‘Guernica’ behind it.” London Review of Books

A Don’t-Miss Art Show

Seattle-based artist Margie Livingston has a gangbusters show at Luis De Jesus Los Angeles in Culver City that tears the idea of painting apart, and then puts it back together. The artist makes “paint objects” — canvases wrapped in acrylic paint skin that she straps to her body, then drags through the city’s streets, among other works. Part penance, part performance, these actions leave behind a work that is as ethereal as it is gritty, an alluring wall hanging that is also evidence of something darkly destructive. Through Saturday. 2685 S. La Cienega Blvd., Culver City, luisdejesus.com.

For more arts listings, see my Culture: High & Low Datebook.

And last but not least...

Your moment of “Hotel California,” sung in French by an Australian Latin jazz/ska band. Take that, Serge Gainsbourg.

Find me on Twitter @cmonstah.