Getty Center Los Angeles, Harold M. Williams Auditorium

Steve Seid, senior video curator, Pacific Film Archive, University of California at Berkeley, celebrates the Golden State’s most renewable resource: celebrity, pure and simple. The works in this screening—which consider celebrity to be one of California’s principal exports—function as obstacles in the easy manufacture and circulation of fame and desire. Artists nudge notoriety through impersonation, as seen in Leslie Singer’s Madonna Series or Lucas Michael’s buoyant Bjorn Again; others mount their mockery as a memento, such as Karla Milosevich’s cosmetically curious Star Exercise or Anne McGuire’s homage to ruin, I Am Crazy and You're Not Wrong. Other artists offer measured critiques of celebrity as a commodity to be devoured or redeemed. Scott Stark’s energetic More than Meets the Eye: Remaking Jane Fonda and Rita Gonzalez’s Electronic Bodies follow popular icons right into the maw of mass culture.