Wilshire Center

The art world has always had a conflicted relationship with the celebrity that occasionally comes to surround one of its own. Celebrity and art are a troubling mix because celebrity puts one in mind of entertainment, and artists go to great lengths to be perceived as something greater than mere entertainers. Then again, the fringe benefits of fame are so attractive that when Life magazine comes to call, who can say no?

L.A. painter Nick Taggart explores the peculiar courtship that goes on between art and mass media (which transforms all it touches into myth) in a series of portraits of art world figures including dealers, collectors, and the geese that lay the golden eggs, artists. Taggart is essentially an appropriationist and his paintings, based on pre-existing photographs (some of them well known), have the cinematic quality of movie stills.

Favoring a black and white palette, Taggart is a curious painter. You can’t quite tell if he wants his work to look bloodless and flat or if he’s technically incapable of putting the paint on better. However, he certainly knows his subject inside and out. Embellished with hip little witticisms (Julian Schnabel lumbering down the beach toting a surfboard), this insider’s hall of fame will amuse those who keep a close eye on the art world. It’s easy to get the jokes, but Taggart plays it close to the vest as far as revealing how he feels about the subject at hand. You keep waiting for him to put a mustache on the Mona Lisa, and that he never does. Re-presenting art world figures as paintings, he judges neither his sitters nor the machinery that converts them into icons. (Fahey/Klein Gallery, 148 N. La Brea Ave., to Jan. 7.)