Art inspired by the Great Recession has yet to make a cultural impact, so this impresses: One of Alex Scheafer’s burning Chase Bank paintings fronts this months Artillery, the West Coast art mag that-unlike NYC-based Artforum and Art in America- is actually readable. We regularly run into Scheafer as he pounds tall boys and paints during Downtown LA Artwalk in his corner of the Hive Gallery. Swell guy if not all that ambitious a painter; we’re glad to see he’s swirling the cadmium flames and three months since   making the LA Times front page, still running with  his fifteen earned after cops rolled up on his en- plein-air-painting ass outside a Chase bank in Van Nuys. Searched his home too, which hasn’t happened to a single banker.

The
Art Walk, a monthly event regularly drawing a throng of thousands to the bum piss-slicked streets of Downtown LA. I’m liking it.