Real Work of Art History

Save your book budget. The long-awaited Dictionary of Art will go on the market in October at a retail price of $8,000. Fourteen years in the making, the 34-volume, 30,000-page tome is billed as the most comprehensive art-historical reference work ever published. Containing 15,000 illustrations, it is also the largest collection of images in any art-historical publication.

To produce the landmark project, Grove’s Dictionaries Inc. commissioned 41,000 articles by 6,700 scholars. Among Southern California contributors are J. Paul Getty Museum curators Lee Hendrix, Catherine Hess and Nicholas Turner; Huntington Gallery curators Amy Meyers, Edward J. Nygren and Robert R. Wark; Bruce Coats, a Japanese art specialist who teaches at Scripps College; and Arthur Ollman, director of the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego.

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HOT TIMES AT MOCA: “Summer Nights at MOCA,” the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Thursday night series, is off and running again. The program offers live music, wine and beer tasting, free museum admission and talks about exhibitions from 5-8 p.m.

June events will be held at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA (formerly the Temporary Contemporary) in Little Tokyo. This week’s program features the William Henderson Quintet. Anne Friedberg, professor of film studies at UC Irvine, will talk about the “Hall of Mirrors” exhibition at 6 p.m.

After a holiday break on July 4, the series will move to MOCA at California Plaza, where Ed Kienholz and Ed Moses retrospectives will be on view. The final installment of the series, on Aug. 29, will offer music by the Tom Harrell Trio and a 6:30 p.m. talk on Kienholz by MOCA curator Elizabeth A.T. Smith.

Information: (213) 621-1749.