Comments (0) Best Exhibition Title - 2010

"Balbone Martinez: Speaking in Parables Will Get You Nowhere With This Crowd,"Art and Culture Center of Hollywood

The title of this tiny show, which was shoehorned into the Art and Culture Center's smallest display space, is a nifty inside joke that works on multiple levels. First, there's no such artist as Balbone Martinez — the moniker melds the names of collaborators Michael Balbone and Emily Martinez. Then there's the subject matter of several of the works, which appropriate Christian iconography for subversive ends. And finally, there's an implicit dig at two subsets of contemporary museumgoers: literalists who analyze everything to death and the terminally clueless, who never quite seem to "get it." That's a lot of baggage, but these dozen words carry it quite handily.