4 x 4. The format (in feet) for each of the works displayed and the principle under which the show operated: three “hot,” young Los Angeles artists who have been and remain close friends showed one work each, and during the show’s run, the fourth “artist”—the three friends working together—produced a multiple. The simplicity of the concept is airily honest about how things get done, stuff gets made, and the art world works. Sadly, some critics could not accept the idea of friendship as a premise for a show, even calling it a “non-premise,” which is, of course, precisely the point—who really

One of the surer signs of life’s imitating art would be gay men’s “’70s clone” deportment (T-shirt, tight jeans, bushy mustache, etc.) revisited by ’80s and ’90s gym queens—“types” that might be traced as far back as the loving exaggerations of ’50s amateur bodybuilders (in underground ’zines like Bob Mizer’s Physique Pictorial) by Tom of Finland, whose pencil, pen, and ink, almost magically, shaped and still shapes, for better or worse, much faggot flesh.

This retrospective of Finland’s oeuvre spanned tender-hearted gouaches from as early as 1946 through graphite works from the “Titeaters” series