Wilshire Center

Lee Kaplan’s clever, relentlessly analytical works take on big issues in contemporary culture. Of course, you have to know the territory--or read up on it. “The Subjects of the Artist” consists of 15 color prints of Japanese textile patterns. On each panel, silk-screened lettering spells out the yen-dollar equivalent on a particular date from 1958 (Kaplan’s birth year) to 1989. The dates have varied significance: major art auctions, events and places in Kaplan’s life, the deaths of well-known people.

Wrapping art-world and real-world events in the mantle of autobiography, the piece is essentially a look at the commercial side of the art world during the past 33 years. The dominance of the Japanese market for Western art is linked to the dominance of the yen; the hype surrounding Sotheby’s 1973 auction of works from Robert Scull’s collection is compared to the mega-hype surrounding Sotheby’s record-breaking 1987 auction of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers” to a Japanese company. The title of the piece, taken from a museum retrospective of Abstract Expressionism--a movement imbued with unbridled emotion and painterly drama--also ironically applies to the dry, guarded approach to making art that Kaplan shares with many of his contemporaries.

Kaplan poaches on the borders of Stephen Prina’s territory in “Notes of a Painter (Luxe, Calme et Volupte).” Each of four aluminum rectangles is labeled with the title of a different Matisse painting and painted a single color evocative of that work. On the assumption that viewers who’ve grown up with modernism can get their jollies from mechanically produced swatches of pure color, Kaplan gives us the fast-read equivalent of the full-blown Fauve experience. Although the piece is more viewer-indulgent than Prina’s work, Kaplan’s approach still--perhaps unwittingly--serves as a touchstone for the new Puritanism in art, in which the eye must be satisfied with meager rewards while the mind is urged toward the greater glory of theory. (Jan Baum Gallery, 170 S. La Brea, to Dec. 29.)