Arts on TV: Chris Botti; Ann Hobson Pilot; Idina Menzel

“Exploring the Arts With Gloria Greer” 6:30 p.m. Thursday, KVCR: Jackie Autry's Private Collection: The veteran journalist chats with art experts in Palm Springs.

“Chris Botti in Boston, Part II” 7 and 11 p.m. Thursday, KOCE: A continuation of the trumpeter's performance with the Boston Pops and conductor Keith Lockhart includes guests Sting, Steven Tyler, Josh Groban and Yo-Yo Ma.

“Open Call” 9 p.m. Thursday, KCET: Live at the Ford-Angel City Jazz Festival.

“L.A. Tonight with Roy Firestone” 10 p.m. Thursday, KCET: Chris Botti. 

“Celtic Woman -- Believe” 9:30 p.m. Friday, KVCR: Classic Irish songs, pop anthems and inspirational songs; from the Fox Theatre in Atlanta.

“L.A. Tonight with Roy Firestone” 10 p.m. Friday, KCET: Steve Tyrell. 

“Inside” 6 p.m. Saturday, KSCI: The Emperor's Treasure: Taiwan's National Palace Museum houses an art collection of more than 600,000 objects that gives a new perspective on China's cultural history.

“Smart Travels: Pacific Rim With Rudy Maxa” 6:30 p.m. Saturday, KLCS: Chinatown and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco; Alcatraz Island; Napa Valley wine country; vegetarian food; wine tasting.

“The Artist Toolbox” 8:30 p.m. Saturday, KLCS: Chef and restaurateur Daniel Boulud discusses the art of French cooking and running his business.

“Clannad Live at Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin” 9 a.m. Sunday, KVCR: The five original founding members of the family group Clannad mark the band's 40th anniversary with a performance in Dublin. With Anúna and Brian Kennedy.

“Great Performances” 6 p.m. Sunday, KOCE; 7 p.m. KVCR: Tony Bennett sings his greatest hits with contemporary artists. Performers include Amy Winehouse, Lady Gaga, Norah Jones, Faith Hill, Carrie Underwood and Willie Nelson.

Movie: “Rembrandt” (1936) 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, TCM: Charles Laughton, Elsa Lanchester. Alexander Korda's fact-based account of the later years in the life of the great 17th-century Dutch artist.

“The Wendy Williams Show” 11 a.m. Tuesday, Fox; midnight, Tue./Wed. BET: Audra McDonald.

Movie: “Lust for Life” (1956) 1 p.m. Tuesday, TCM: Kirk Douglas, Anthony Quinn. Tormented Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh meets French painter Paul Gauguin.

“The Wendy Williams Show” 2 p.m. Tuesday, Fox: Nick Jonas; Ruben Studdard performs.

“L.A. Tonight With Roy Firestone” 10 p.m. Tuesday, KCET: Debbie Allen.

“A Harpist's Legacy: Ann Hobson Pilot and the Sound of Change” 10:30 p.m. Tuesday, KCET: The life and career of Ann Hobson Pilot, former principal harpist for the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

“L.A. Tonight with Roy Firestone” 10 p.m. Wednesday, KCET: David Foster. 

“Idina Menzel Live -- Barefoot at the Symphony” Midnight Wednesday, KVCR: Menzel performs Broadway classics, her own selections and contemporary songs with Taye Diggs and composer Marvin Hamlisch.

-- Compiled by Ed Stockly

 Photo: Idina Menzel. Credit: Robin Wong / PBS

Art review: My Barbarian at Human Resources

Much of what is unique, relevant and delightful about the performance collective My Barbarian is contained in the title of its current exhibition at Human Resources: “Broke People’s Baroque Peoples’ Theater.”

Say it out loud a few times — it’s lovely on the tongue and only gets funnier the more you repeat it.

Note the ironic conceptual gulf (aesthetic, economic and ideological) between the nearly homophonic “broke” and “Baroque”; the clever dance of that syntactically pivotal apostrophe (“people’s,” “peoples’”); the understated nod to pressing political realities — namely, the dawning awareness brought on by the recession that we live in an age of egregious economic disparity, in which the Baroque — or those socio-political forces there engendered — have long since washed their hands of the broke and retreated to the comfort of their private home theaters. 

It is much to our benefit that My Barbarian (the trio of Jade Gordon, Malik Gaines and Alexandro Segade) remains out here with the rest of us.

Art review: 'Ellsworth Kelly: Prints and Paintings' at LACMA

You don’t need to be a film critic, or an English major, to know that movies and novels are more like apples and oranges than peas in a pod. It’s hardly uncommon to find that the film adaptation of a book is not as satisfying as reading it was. “I liked the movie but it wasn’t as good as the book,” people will say.

Something similar — yet significantly different — takes place in the visual arts. Like movies, lithographs and screenprints are often treated as lesser versions of paintings or sculptures, either inadequate translations of the originals or mere souvenirs that call to mind more ambitious, and expensive, masterpieces.

But that’s not always the case. At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Ellsworth Kelly: Prints and Paintings” brings together 99 prints, 16 sketches, three paintings and one sculpture by the 88-year-old New York artist. Drawn mostly from the collection of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, the sharply focused show has been organized by curators Stephanie Barron and Britt Salvesen. With lovely light-handedness, it demonstrates that Kelly’s prints are more like books than movies.

Art Review: Rosson Crow at Honor Fraser

Sorting the flash from the substance in the work of a prestigiously educated and excessively hyped young painter such as Rosson Crow is an ambiguous business. Her first L.A. solo show, at Honor Fraser in 2008, leaned mostly toward flash — big canvases, a blaring neon palette, heaps of stylishly graffiti-inflected activity buzzing across the surface of the picture plane — complicated by glimpses of what looked to be a soundly developing painterly intelligence. 

In this, her second L.A. solo show (after shows in Paris, London, New York and elsewhere), that ratio appears to have been reversed. She’s kept the big canvases but drained all the color, leaving a moody, atmospheric range of pre-Technicolor gray. She’s exchanged the jumbled, vaguely sordid interior scenes for a loosely abstracted urban milieu: landscapes of a scale suggesting the sites of rallies, marches, and ticker-tape parades, though devoid of figures and most identifiable detail.

Art review: Stanya Kahn at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

Stanya Kahn is the sort of performer who has only to walk down the street to be riveting — as proven repeatedly in the numerous video works of recent years that feature her mostly doing just that: wandering the streets of L.A. in a Viking hat and a bloody nose, carrying a wedge of fake Swiss cheese in “Can’t Swallow It, Can’t Spit It Out” of 2006; hobbling down urban streets and desert dirt roads on crutches, her head wrapped in bandages, in “It’s Cool, I’m Good” of 2010.

In “Lookin’ Good, Feelin’ Good,” one of four videos in her second solo show at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, we find her strutting through town in a giant foam penis costume: talking on her cellphone, high-fiving strangers, ordering a hot dog at Wienerschnitzel. The effect is as bizarrely amusing as ever.

More intriguing, however — and no less entertaining — is the departure she makes in the other three videos, removing herself entirely as a character and focusing on what is clearly a highly developed instinct for the visual language of video (one often overshadowed by her charismatic presence) on the activation of inanimate objects.

“Happy Song for You,” a vividly peculiar impressionistic short made last year in collaboration with artist Lynn Foulkes, appears to have served as the launching point for a looser and more richly imaginative exploration of objects.

Art review: 'Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha' at Blum & Poe

"Requiem for the Sun: The Art of the Mono-ha," at Blum & Poe, explores a rich sliver of 20th century Japanese art that, though little known this side of the Pacific, provides an illuminating counterpoint to Western traditions of Minimalism and Land Art. 

Mono-ha, which translates roughly as "school of things," was the name given to a loose group of artists — there are 10 in the show — working in Japan in the socially tumultuous period of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The work, formulated largely in reaction to Western Modernism, is elemental and rigorously spare, favoring the careful arrangement of found objects over the crafting of raw materials. Of the nearly three dozen sculptures in the show, none involves more than two or three elements, composed with exquisite deliberation: a 14-foot steel pipe stuffed with cotton (by Katsuro Yoshida); a pair of black, lacquered steel containers filled so precisely with water that the liquid surface is indistinguishable from the lacquered sides (by Nobuo Sekine); a raw chunk of granite, 5 feet square, that sits like a weightless trinket in a huge paper envelope (by Susumu Koshimizu).  (Because of the originally ephemeral nature of the work, the majority of the pieces in the show are artist-sanctioned re-creations.)

The arrangements draw upon the unique physicality of each material, playing up contrasts and dialectical relationships — light and heavy; solid and hollow; hard and soft; organic and industrial — with a precision that gives them the feel of 3-D koans. Like the American Minimalists, the Mona-ha artists often employed these materials in such a way as to call attention to a work’s surroundings, emphasizing its effect on the space it occupied.

In a canonical work by Lee Ufan, the Korean-born artist who became the movement’s central theoretician, a large stone rests on a plate of glass that’s been shattered by its weight. In Kishio Suga’s “Infinite Situation II (steps),” a gallery stairwell has been filled with sand and graded into a smooth, even incline — a gesture that gently but decisively eradicates the function of the architecture, underscoring the tenuousness of the relationship between the built and the natural environment.  

Arts on TV: Placido Domingo; Oscar Hammerstein; Il Volo; 'Phantom'

"Open Call" 9 p.m. Thursday, KCET: Kenny Burrell 

"SoCal Insider With Rick Reiff" 7:30 p.m. Friday, 11:30 a.m., Sunday, KOCE: "Greatest Living Tenor": Interview with opera legend Placido Domingo.

"The World's Greatest Musical Prodigies" 8 p.m. Friday, KLCS: Alexander meets and auditions four pianists age 8 to 12.

"Great Performances" 8:30 p.m. Friday; 12:30 p.m. Sunday; 7 p.m., Wednesday, KOCE: "The Phantom of the Opera" at the Royal Albert Hall : Ramin Karimloo and Sierra Boggess star in a fully-staged production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's "The Phantom of the Opera," from London's Royal Albert Hall.

"Late Night With Jimmy Fallon" 12:37 a.m. Friday, NBC: Actor Paul Rudd; actress Gabrielle Union; performance from "Sister Act."

"The Voice" 4 p.m. Saturday, E!: The Blind Auditions, Part 5 : More vocalists audition for the judges. (Part 5 of 5)

"Il Volo Takes Flight" 5:30 p.m. Saturday, KOCE: The Italian teen vocal group performs classical and traditional Italian songs at the Detroit Opera House.

"The Artist Toolbox" 8:30 p.m. Saturday, KLCS: American Ballet Theatre principal dancers Irina Dvorovenko and Maxim Beloserkovsky discuss the rigors of being a professional dancer.

"Yanni -- Live at El Morro" 9 p.m. Saturday, KOCE: Yanni performs with his 15-piece orchestra at El Morro, a 16th-century citadel in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

"Oscar Hammerstein II -- Out of My Dreams" 7 p.m. Sunday, KOCE; 8:30 p.m. Sunday, KVCR: Lyricist and librettist Oscar Hammerstein II worked in theater for more than 40 years, writing lyrics to more than 1,000 songs and the books of 45 operettas and musicals.

"Idina Menzel Live -- Barefoot at the Symphony" 8:30 p.m. Sunday, KOCE: Menzel performs Broadway classics, her own selections and contemporary songs with Taye Diggs and composer Marvin Hamlisch.

RELATED:

"Oscar Hammerstein II: Out of My Dreams" details Broadway pioneer

-- Compiled by Ed Stockly

Photo: "The Phantom of the Opera" stars Ramin Karimloo as the Phantom. Credit: Alastair Muir

Music review: Pablo Heras-Casado, Martin Chalifour and L.A. Phil

The career of Pablo Heras-Casado has been rocketing along as of late –- a debut with the Berlin Philharmonic last October, landing an American post as principal conductor of New York’s Orchestra of St. Luke’s in December, and so forth. He has a lot on his plate -– chamber music, early music, opera, standard symphonic repertoire -– yet seems to be most celebrated for his work with new music.

So in his return to Walt Disney Concert Hall on Saturday afternoon, Heras-Casado offered something new -– the West Coast premiere of a violin concerto by James Matheson, director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Composer Fellowship Program –- following a rather blunt, lean-and-mean rendition of Beethoven’s “Egmont” Overture with the orchestra.  

The Matheson concerto was first performed in December by Esa-Pekka Salonen (who recently wrote an impressive violin concerto himself) and the Chicago Symphony. It must be a coincidence that both Matheson’s and Salonen’s concertos open in a similar way, with perpetual-motion violin right from the starting gate. 

NEA-style community-building via arts has lost ground in state

Rocco Landesman, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, came to Watts and neighboring Willowbrook on Thursday for walking tours and briefings on how $720,000 in grants funded or coordinated by the NEA is being spent. 

The money was generated by Our Town and ArtPlace, two programs begun under Landesman that aim to use the arts as a tool for neighborhood improvement and fostering economic growth.

But a major new California state policy works at cross-purposes to what Landesman is trying to accomplish on a federal level. From the late 1960s on, municipal redevelopment agencies in the state often funded arts and cultural projects on the same theory that guides Our Town and ArtPlace -- that in addition to their aesthetic and educational value, arts attractions foster tourism, an engaged and active citizenry, and economic growth.

Those efforts ended on Feb. 1, when California's redevelopment agencies, which were created to fight urban blight and promote economic activity, ceased to exist. Driven by the budget crises lingering over Sacramento and municipalities, and questioning the efficacy of redevelopment spending, Gov. Jerry Brown and the state Legislature abolished the agencies so that billions of dollars in property taxes they'd controlled could be diverted to other government purposes.

More than $350 million in arts projects have been funded by redevelopment agencies in Los Angeles County over the past 45 years, including construction of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s Grand Avenue headquarters ($23 million) and the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts ($60 million).

Art world responds to death of Kenneth Price

The art world is mourning the loss of artist Kenneth Price, who died early Friday at his home in Taos, N.M. He was 77.

The Los Angeles-born artist, who had struggled with tongue and throat cancer, is to be the subject of a 50-year retrospective opening at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in September. In honor of the artist, LACMA, which owns 40 works by Price, plans to put his 2011 piece "Zizi" on view in the lobby of its Ahmanson Building on Monday. It has also updated its exhibition website with some of Price's photos. 

"Price was unwavering in his approach and resolute in his practice while the art world around him was intent upon other forms and directions," LACMA curator Stephanie Barron wrote in a memo to staff. "He was relentless and determined, even during his prolonged illness. Through it all he managed to make incredible, joyful work that is at once subtle and brave, serious and sly."

Barron, who is curating the upcoming retrospective, added that Price had been involved with the planning and publication of the show until two weeks ago. "He had approved the installation design, read every word of the catalogue, made suggestions about the nature of the illustrations, given us notes on the height of each sculpture we will display, and even how he would like them illuminated," she said. "At least there will be a chance to celebrate his life in six months with the show and catalogue."