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Essential Arts covers the depth and breadth of Southern California’s complex cultural sphere: the latest biennial, the avant-garde building design, a groundbreaking opera and the Pulitzer Prize-winning play — along with all the bits of related news emerging from the region and beyond.
We’ll also send you recommendations and reviews from our award-winning critics, investigations, profiles, interviews, photo essays and explanatory pieces produced by a team of longtime journalists wh know what’s happening in every creative corner of L.A. and beyond.
Recent Newsletters
The immersive art exhibit “Hospital of Emotions” is getting a super creepy after-dark makeover for Halloween, including a chilling spook show in the basement.
The anonymous arts group known as Secret Handshake’s latest satirical anti-Trump artwork is a playable video game console called, “Nuuk ‘Em All,” in, yes, Nuuk, Greenland.
L.A. Times classical music critic Mark Swed has retired. He was the last full-time classical music critic at a major American newspaper.
The recent Kennedy Center firestorm points to an unusual presidential obsession with the nation’s performing arts center.
Swedish arts group BKN offers residencies and support to California fire victims through a new organization, Los Angeles Wildfire Survivors.
Fall will soon arrive with a flurry of great art exhibits, riveting dance and theater shows and plenty of classical music
Fans can pay tribute to the late artist Yayoi Kusama by visiting one of her two Infinity Mirror Rooms at the Broad in L.A.
The Silver Lake arts scene was filled with vibrant young artists and musicians in the early aughts, many of whom are still creating rich new work today.
‘The children are especially sad,’ a 10-year-old writes about the loss of music and art teachers as a new school year begins at Pasadena Unified School District.
The Cultural Landscape Foundation sent a letter to the National Park Service calling plans for Trump’s Triumphal Arch “horrifically flawed.”
Departing Public Theater artistic director Oskar Eustis weighs in on the future of nonprofit theater and why it is no longer financially viable.
TV ‘Batman’s’ Wayne Manor hits the Pasadena real estate market for $32 million, the Hollywood Bowl sound, Yoko Ono and the story behind ‘Phantom’s’ chandelier.
The Essential Arts Team
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Jessica Gelt is the arts editor for the Los Angeles Times.
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Christopher Knight won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for criticism and was a finalist for the prize in 1991, 2001 and 2007.
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Mark Swed was the classical music critic of the Los Angeles Times from 1996 to 2026.
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Charles McNulty is the theater critic of the Los Angeles Times.
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Now in his second tour with the Los Angeles Times, totaling more than 25 years, Kevin Crust is the planning editor for Entertainment and Arts.