Diva Corp Is Disrupting the LA Art Scene

April 06, 2026

“Who do you think Diva Corp is?” It’s a question I’ve heard more than once at parties in Los Angeles.

Through their anonymous, often unforgiving reviews, the art criticism collective has operated as something of a vigilante in the LA art scene. Their adversary is a culture of criticism they see as too lenient with work that recycles familiar forms while failing to seriously reckon with the media conditions of the internet. They have been called trolls, edgelords, and worse. Diva Corp would call it taking art seriously.

The collective’s recent projects include a staged disruption of a critics’ panel at ArtCenter College of Design, “Gun,” a poem adapted into a video piece by Petra Cortright, and The Meeting, a solo exhibition currently on view at Pio Pico.

Words by Rina Nicolae

What is your algorithm serving you these days?

Recently I’ve been really into these TikTok edits, I watch them every morning. Not sure what they’re called, but they’ve got this song from Tron, and then just fantastic clips of a rocket ship, and then vintage paparazzi Kylie Jenner, then a drug mule on a cigarette boat, then a beach on the Amalfi coast. It’s like coffee without the jitters. It propels me without fear. Much better than Instagram. All I see over there is writers making sex their whole personality. Is there anything less interesting than sex right now?

Do you think of yourselves primarily as critics intervening through art, or as artists for whom criticism is one of the available forms?

I don’t really understand the distinction between artist and critic. Can you be one and not the other? Like, I get what you mean in the classical sense, and the art world definitely reinforces that fiction with its hierarchies or whatever, but I can’t think of a good artist removed from critiquing the world around them. If you believe in art, you aim for something more; you build what you want to see. To me, that’s criticism. And that’s not a cop-out, I’m not trying to be inclusive here. Most people lack that vision. At the end of the day, there really aren’t that many artists in the art world.

Is there anything less interesting than sex right now?

Your recent work explicitly references the works of other artists: your painting in The Meeting – your solo show at Pio Pico – is a copy of Jeremy Ringermacher and Ariel Pink’s The Last Art Piece; your poem “Gun” which was recently read by Petra Cortright makes reference to Gregory Corso’s poem “Bomb”; and your painting Eliza Douglas: Guggenheim, Overduin & Co. is a depiction of an installation view of an Eliza Douglas show, which was itself a staging of the Guggenheim. What interests you about these chains of repetition?

That’s a good question. None of that work is really a copy. The piece at Pio Pico, for example, remakes Ringermacher and Pink’s painting, but in composition only: the subjects are completely different, and the concept, too. Plus there’s not really any documentation of the original – it’s from 1999, when they were undergrads at CalArts… the truest reference was actually some random family photo with the painting way in the background – so how faithful could a copy really be? I guess, then, it makes more sense to call these moves “interpolations” or something, and I think that’s all about momentum and curiosity. The originals are autonomous little things that burrowed into me, mainly because of the stories that came with them. I’m chasing after all that to see where it goes, and sometimes it goes somewhere beautiful and unexpected, like what Petra did with Gun.

At the Pio Pico show, viewers had to hand over their phones before entering the room to see the painting (Untitled (Young adults are having less sex than ever), 2026), while your performance at the ArtCenter panel seemed designed to live on through retelling and digital recording. It often feels like your work is designed to acquire a social life. To what extent is that afterlife part of the work?

You’ve almost conflated these two things – “social life” and “afterlife.” I hadn’t considered it, but they’re pretty similar. When you’re out at a bar, at Prado or whatever… you might as well be in Hades, no? It’s just like this Fortnite lobby full of hysteria, intrigue, and dread. All those lives, unresolved, waiting to be judged... Isn’t that what art is? People want art to be heaven, but that’s so frictionless. And decided. The social life of a work is exciting precisely because it’s alive, and because I have no control over it. For example, that lady who fainted at Pio Pico – she’s now part of the work, whether I like it or not. She thought she saw herself in the painting and, even though she wasn’t actually in it, now she is.

Can rumor, gossip, and word-of-mouth be more aesthetically serious than images?

Well, we’re overrun by images at this point, that’s obvious, but it’s funny: without fail every artist still documents their stuff ruthlessly, and artlessly, in image form. Every single one. All this while they complain about “slop” and homogeneity, by the way. Again, their artistic choice – with the show’s “afterlife,” as you call it, in mind – is to do what everyone else does. Can you imagine? And, maybe worse, a lot of the time it’s the first thing they think about. “How will this look in documentation?” takes precedence over the personal encounter, over something more visceral. If documentation is really that important, and I think it is, why not approach it more critically? Why not use a new frame?

People want art to be heaven, but that’s so frictionless.

How have media conditions of instant circulation, total documentation, and algorithmic visibility changed what kinds of art feel consequential?

It’s just made art seem that much more unimaginative. Like, these are all new levers to play with, right? Yet no one really wants to touch them. There’s even this whole trend of refusal when it comes to new tech, an active unwillingness to adapt. Curiosity, then, is what? A vice? I don’t get it, it’s conservative, it’s scared. Take streaming: why doesn’t art consider it under a performance umbrella, or as art at all? Here we are, staring down an untapped and lucrative form, and the academy can’t even be bothered to take a second look. It’s why I was so shocked at the reception to our ArtCenter panel: a lot of people, including students – *art* students, mind you – got angry because they wanted to hear debates about oil painting, traditional mid-century stuff or whatever. They felt like we derailed that possibility. To me, though, we were just playing with the tools available, tools that art neglects, that are much more relevant than the ones they don’t.

What would you say to people who think Diva Corp is just a group of edgelord assholes trolling the art establishment?

Oh gosh, I wish them the best. These people love to overcode what we do. They overcode everything, really, it’s sort of endemic in their pocket of the art world. Like, they’ll see the color red and immediately think of Mussolini, and then all of a sudden they’ve got you cornered, talking about how to overthrow the technocracy and their plans for the next No Kings protest. It’s like, great! I’m glad you’re passionate, but what’s that got to do with “red”? There’s comfort in simplicity for them, though, I guess.

When is transgression necessary?

I don’t think too much about transgression. Maybe the more important question is, like, “When is it necessary to fear?” And the answer to that is always: Never. Do what you know is right.

Art

Form Without Formula: Ruth Asawa At Guggenheim Bilbao

May 01, 2026

Ruth Aiko Asawa believed that every minute attached to the earth should be spent doing something. That mantra is breathed into life into a new exhibition celebrating her work, Ruth Asawa: Retrospective, now open at the Guggenheim Bilbao.

The first major coverage of the artist’s work on the European continent, it comes alongside a wider appreciation of her craft and attention to space and form, coinciding with the 100th anniversary of Asawa’s birthday. Organised in partnership with the Museum of Modern Art, SFMOMA, and Guggenheim Bilbao, it is the first major museum retrospective to fully examine her six-decade practice containing 240 of her works, opening her practice up to a new generation and reaffirming her place as one of the defining American artists of the postwar period.

Words by Christine Ochefu

Bilbao’s Guggenheim is maybe an ideal setting for an artist so deeply concerned with space, movement, and form. Asawa’s work sits among other legendary names: Jenny Holzer, Yayoi Kusama, Rothko, Richard Serra’s gargantuan steel structure hovering nearby. Yet her sculptures feel entirely their own; her signature hanging forms, made from brass, copper, and bronze wire appear almost weightless. Often untitled, unnamed, and without obvious formula, they move with light and air despite their industrial materials. Still, there are repeated motifs: visually emulating woven baskets and craft weaving, her suspended forms use endless loops of wire to create “forms within forms,” often resembling cells, fruit, flowers, or planets suspended in space.

And in the exhibition there is a deeper appreciation of Asawa’s life and artistic principles. Born to Japanese American farmer parents, Asawa was busy from childhood, balancing schoolwork with life on the family farm whilst holding a strong work ethic from youth. During World War II, her family was forcibly placed in Japanese American internment camps under the Roosevelt administration, she and her siblings becoming separated from their father during the process. But even in the midst of her detainment she kept making, and her creativity was never separate from labour; she took life drawing classes and was inspired by the practice of fellow detainees, some of whom had worked as animators for Disney. She sourced any materials she could find— discarded rubber sheets, leaves even— to make her art.

It was only in later years she would become introduced to the looped wire technique she is widely known for, spending a summer in Toluca, Mexico, where she would take to traditional woven baskets sold at a craft market. But what makes the retrospective especially powerful is its attention to Asawa beyond the now-iconic wire sculptures. The exhibition offers a vision of Asawa as a woman whose private life was intimately reflected in her art, speaking to the age-old tussle between art, womanhood and motherhood and how she overcame it

For Asawa, the two were never separate. Her work was not made despite domestic life, but through it, with family, children, and home forming as part of the practice itself. Pieces drawn from her later years in San Francisco intimately bring her private life into focus and reveal the breadth of her multidisciplinary practice: paintings, drawings, prints, and notably clay and bronze casting. There are children’s feet cast in bronze, such as that of her grandson Henry, as well as casts of her own tools, her hands. Asawa famously plaster cast the faces of people in her home studio at the kitchen table, usually taking to a subject if she thought they looked interesting. And littered across the exhibition are some selections of those thousands of faces she cast in her lifetime. The artist once said that “an artist is someone who can take ordinary things and make them special.” It feels like both an artistic principle and a metaphor for her life.

Asawa spent much of her career defying the boxes placed around her— racism, wartime incarceration, discrimination, and the tendency to overlook women artists whose work was seen as too domestic or decorative. At the Guggenheim Bilbao, Ruth Asawa’s work feels both delicate and radical in reminding us how she turned those assumptions inside out. It reminds us that form does not need formula, and that the most powerful art can come from repetition, domesticity, and the refusal to stop making.

Art

Barbara Kruger: The Supreme Collager

April 30, 2026

Participating in the annual New York Antiquarian Book Fair, Harper's Books will exhibit acclaimed artists, including the legendary collager, Barbara Kruger. The collection of her original paste-ups encapsulates the artist's early transition from editorial design to contemporary art. As such, the collection feel more like an act of construction. Her blocky cut-outs of Futura are carefully assembled, tested, and positioned in order to simplify intense messages. Based on her time as a designer from both Mademoiselle magazine and leftist book publisher Schocken, Kruger masters how to strategically synthesize words and images in a way that is minimalistic yet riveting.

The work foregrounds her artistic methodology that defines her reputable portfolio today. This developmental phase reflects on how images circulate, how authority is established, and how meaning is shaped through the pairing of text and imagery. The pieces are from the 80s, when the voices answering these questions were still forming, meek and fluid. There's something so compelling about artwork from that past that so accurately portrays the present, reminding us that time exists on a spiral rather a linear line.

From April 30th to May 3rd, visit booth C23 at Park Avenue Armory to catch her work on display and for sale.

Art

Paul McCarthy: Power in the Provocative

I do what I want—what I believe in. We’re living in a pretty extreme time, and when people say my work is getting more extreme, I think that just reflects the world around us. I’m simply moving with the current.

Born in Salt Lake City, Utah, McCarthy’s beginning in the art world stems from proximal radicalization. After moving from Salt Lake City to study in San Francisco, McCarthy's work as an artist has always embodied this radicalization. Street-wise, known for being one of the most

“dangerous” artists in Los Angeles, this exhibit encapsulates that at its forefront. The artworks present provocative, scattered drawings and paintings that promote freedom from systematic censorship in the exchange between creator and receiver. His art style is distinctive in its intention of visibility over technicality, as seen in his limited color palette and intentionally imperfect techniques, but radical imagery.

McCarthy speaks about his artistic process as though the outcomes are inevitable and incredibly natural to him, given the current state of the world. Living in times of constant uncertainty has blurred the lines of media censorship; almost everything we consume is shaped by it, raising questions such as: Why was this said? Why was this created? Who is this for? Paul McCarthy’s work deconstructs this. His drive to create authentically and follow what feels natural to him results in art that inhabits the visual extremes of human experience, with the spirit of contestation serving as an added layer to the experience.