My favorite part of Friday's ABC-TV "General Hospital" episode, which was shot one night last month at the Museum of Contemporary Art's outpost at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, comes right at the start. As the outdoor set for a performance by artist Franco, played by actor James Franco, is being decorated, the soundtrack does its level best to mimic "Masterpiece Theatre."

Stinky cheese is always best when it's served ripe.

However, the witty violins soon give way to a driving techno beat, and everything immediately flattens out and becomes predictably bland. Not least are the jejune musings on art, life, illusion, inspiration, performance, spontaneity, interpretation, death, reality, shock and blah-blah-blah, delivered throughout the episode by assorted characters.

There's no point in recounting the story line, which concerns the usual daytime escape into kidnapping, murder and suicide, here all swirling around the gassy cliche of artist-as-sociopath. Suffice it to say that Franco the actor doesn't just play "Franco" the artist; metaphorically, he also plays actor/artist Dennis Hopper playing Frank Booth in "Blue Velvet" or Howard Payne in "Speed," currently enshrined in a mostly tedious exhibition of paintings, sculptures and photographs at MOCA's Geffen Contemporary.

A film about the soap opera's taping and its television broadcast is slated to be screened at MOCA at an unspecified future date. I suppose the only question now is why anyone would care.

If you missed Friday's "General Hospital," or prior snippets in episodes that aired last Monday and Thursday, and you aren't concerned about losing some time that would be more productively spent hitting yourself in the temple with a ball-peen hammer, they're available for a short time at Hulu.

--Christopher Knight

Follow me @twitter.com/KnightLAT

Photo: Actor James Franco and MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch. Credit: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times

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The strangest roomful of art right now in Los Angeles

--Time warp: "Glee" plans a "Rocky Horror" episode. (Los Angeles Times)

--D'oh!: And "Glee" may be making an appearance on "The Simpsons." (Los Angeles Times)

--New chief: Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa picks City Hall veteran Michael LoGrande, the city's chief zoning administrator, to replace Gail Goldberg as director of planning. (Los Angeles Times)

--Coincidence?: In wake of publicity about censorship, YouTube reinstates video by Los Angeles artist Susan Mogul. But you have to sign in to see it. (YouTube)

--Would Rothko approve?: "Red" star and Tony nominee Alfred Molina takes a TV job, playing deputy district attorney in the new "Law & Order: Los Angeles." (Los Angeles Times)

--Protecting the arts: Former NEA President Bill Ivey thinks the United States needs a "cultural EPA." (Boston Globe)

--Changing her mind: Twenty-four-year-old retired actress Amanda Bynes, who starred in the film version of "Hairspray," is no longer retired. (People)

--Posthumous honors: Singer Louis Prima gets a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (Los Angeles Times)

--Serious play: Lego architecture, and architect and Lego master Adam Reed Tucker, get a showing at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.  (Washington Post)

--Tony producer dies: Buff Cobb, who received a Tony nomination for producing the 1963 Broadway revival of "Too True to be Good," starring Lillian Gish, has died. (Los Angeles Times)

And in the Los Angeles Times: Art critic Christopher Knight reviews "Manly Pursuits: The Sporting Images of Thomas Eakins" at LACMA; Music critic Mark Swed reviews iPalpiti Orchestral Ensemble of International Laureates at Walt Disney Concert Hall; and Tony Perry writes about the "Theater of War" project for Camp Pendleton Marines.

--Lisa Fung

Photo: Back to front at left, Naya Rivera, Amber Riley and Lea Michele; and back to front at right, Heather Morris, Dianna Agron and Jenna Ushkowitz. Credit: Fox

The problem with murals is that they tend to stay put, like the mountain Muhammad had to go to in the old proverb because it wasn't about to come to him.

Gregorio Luke has long offered a solution to Southern Californians who want to get an overview of the master Mexican muralists of the 20th century -- not to mention a little fresh air -- without overtaxing their travel budgets.

His "Murals Under the Stars" series of art-history show-and-tells using giant projections began while Luke was director of the Museum of Latin American Art in Long Beach from 1999 to 2007. Since then, Luke has also used the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre and the Hollywood Forever cemetery as venues for his multimedia elucidations of Mexican art, history and culture.

All popular art forms have their greatest hits compilations, and now Luke is offering his own: He's bringing "The Best of Murals Under the Stars" to the Museum of Latin American Art on Sunday, promising "a general panorama of the muralist movement." The museum's website promises 30 life-size projections focusing mainly on works by Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siquieros and Rufino Tamayo, but also showing murals of Juan O'Gorman, Pablo Esteban O'Higgins and Jose Gonzalez Camarena that Luke hasn't previously included in his murals series.

Recession got you down? The oil-volcano making you blue? Sick of the blatant racism seeping into our national political discourse?

Help is at hand. With the 40-year retrospective of Dennis Hopper's art finally opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in downtown L.A., and a joint Steven Spielberg/George Lucas exhibition underway at Washington's Smithsonian American Art Museum, we now have coast-to-coast Hollywood celebrity art museum shows to distract our battered spirits.

The question is: Which major art museum will be the first to go all the way out on a precarious limb and mount a full-scale celebrity survey-palooza?

If you think not enough material is available, think again. Tons of celebrities paint, sculpt, draw and snap shutters. You can find about 100 famous candidates here -- including drawings and paintings by the brilliant stand-up comedy legend, Phyllis Diller.

And I've even got an idea for a guest curator: Arianna Huffington. Her 1989 trash-wallow biography of Picasso was made into a Hollywood potboiler starring Anthony Hopkins.

Some of this stuff is seriously worth looking at too: Hopper's 1960s photographs, say, or Martin Mull's poignant paintings of suburban alienation and Herb Alpert's colossal sculptural monoliths. The rest? Well, maybe we'll only know for sure when a courageous art museum steps up to the plate and gives us a chance for deep engagement.

Or, on second thought, maybe not...

-- Christopher Knight

Follow me @twitter.com/KnightLAT

Photo: Phyllis Diller; Credit: Los Angeles Times file photo

If an image of a painting that pops up on a computer screen can be considered a viewing, then Frida Kahlo may be setting a record today for the most glimpses of an artist's self-portrait -- thanks to Google, which is marking her 103rd birthday by incorporating her art into the Google logo on its search engine.

This tradition of "Google doodles" to mark holidays, birthdays and other special occasions goes back to 1999.

In order to make Kahlo's birthday a happier one, however, the Google artists seem to have taken some liberties to make the 1940 self-portrait upon which the doodle image appears to be based a tad more festive -- and perhaps to skirt the need for copyright approval.

Instead of the necklace of thorns the artist wears in the painting that most closely resembles the doodle, Google has outfitted her with a necklace made of bone that's seen in another self-portrait. Also understandably absent are the bloody droplets and scratches seen on Kahlo's throat in the thorn-necklace image. And the Google birthday girl sports a rich blue robe, replacing the drab greenish-brown one in the original.

But when it comes to birthdays, it's the thought that counts -- no? Kahlo joins Karel Capek, Anton Chekhov, Norman Rockwell, Frederic Chopin, Tchaikovsky, Antonio Vivaldi, Napoleon Orda, Robert Schumann and Django Reinhardt among playwrights, musicians and visual artists whom Google has doodled to mark their birthdays so far in 2010.

The tradition goes back to 1999, when Google artists began tinkering with the search engine logo to mark special people, occasions and events. They include a couple of turns by notable guest artists: Jeff Koons providing a bouquet of colorful metallic lollipop-looking shapes on April 30, 2008, and Shepard Fairey doing the honors on an image of Martin Luther King Jr. to celebrate King's birthday on Jan. 19, 2009.

The official word from company spokesman Gabriel Stricker: "Google doodles aim to celebrate interesting events and anniversaries around the world that reflect Google's personality and love of art and innovation. In honoring Frida Kahlo's birthday, we're continuing a tradition of celebrating artists who have transcended their genre to become cultural icons that have made a lasting impact on people around the world."

For all the doodles to date, click here.

-- Mike Boehm

Photo: Frida Kahlo birthday image. Credit: Google

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New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art is known for its grand exhibitions of iconic visual artists, most of them dead, but also a few living ones who have attained high-ranking stature in their fields.

So it struck many in the art world as strange when the museum announced this week that it would be taking a step -- albeit a small step -- in the direction of pop culture by displaying former Beatle Ringo Starr's gold-plated snare drum that he used while still performing with the band. 

The snare drum comes from the Ludwig Drum Company and was used during the Beatles' 1964 U.S. tour. It will be displayed at the Met from July 7 to the end of 2010 to commemorate Starr's 70th birthday.

The Met's musical-instrument department, which is organizing the display, specializes in instruments from the baroque and classical periods, as well as non-European instruments from Asia and Africa. 

Jayson Kerr Dobney, the associate curator of the department, said the uncharacteristic detour into rock music came about when Starr was at the museum recently to tape an installment of the PBS series "Live from the Artists Den."

"I'm an amateur drummer, so I had known about this iconic gold drum and I asked him if he would consider loaning it to us for a while," said Dobney. "He said that he would be honored to."

The curator said the museum doesn't have rock instruments in its permanent collection, but that doesn't mean it won't consider them down the road. "These things are becoming so iconic," he said. "It may not seem like they're from all that long ago, but they're from a turning point in history, and many have already attained an important cultural stature."

He added that unlike other curatorial areas of the museum, the musical-instruments department considers works from all periods of history. "We take it day by day," said Dobney. "If something appears to be important to us historically, we would consider it."

According to the museum, the drum was given to him by the Ludwig Drum Company in Chicago in appreciation of popularizing the Ludwig name -- visible on the front of the large bass drum --  during the band's February 1964 appearances on "The Ed Sullivan Show."

The drum will be displayed as part of the museum's musical-instrument galleries, which have recently reopened following an eight-month hiatus.

-- David Ng

Photo: Ringo Starr, with other members of the Beatles and friends, and his gold-plated snare drum. Credit: Ludwig Drums / Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In 1994, the year President Clinton presented the National Medal of Arts to painter Wayne Thiebaud, the artist's design for California's first specialty license plate began turning up on streets and freeways around the state. As graphic design it's lovely -- and an authentic example of Pop art.

Now the California Arts Council is optimistically hoping to raise at least $40 million for arts funding through an aggressive effort to sell Thiebaud's plates. The project even has its own Facebook page -- "Million Plates Campaign." With 73,000 such plates currently registered, there's a long way to go to reach that number by the January target date.

Sunny optimism is integral to Thiebaud's design. But so is a subject not immediately associated with the painter, albeit one that has in fact been a long-standing preoccupation.

 

Certainly one of the most provocative music videos in recent memory, Lady Gaga's "Alejandro" features Nazi leather imagery, writhing half-naked bodies and various forms of Catholic Church desecration. Think '80's-era Madonna crossed with Liliana Cavani's 1974 film, "The Night Porter," and you'll have a pretty good idea of Lady Gaga's latest attempt at shocking the bourgeoisie. 

Such over-the-top imagery is naturally ripe for parody. One spoof that is making the rounds on YouTube comes from an unlikely source -- actress Jackie Hoffman, who is starring in Broadway's "The Addams Family" in the role of crusty old Grandma.

In the spoof, Hoffman appears to play Lady Gaga in character as Grandma from the Broadway show. Throughout the video, she dances with the aid of a walker and poses provocatively in her old-lady underwear. At one point in the video, she sports a pair of pasties in the form of tubes of Fixodent.

The video is directed by Jake Wilson of "The Battery's Down," an online comedy series that features guest appearances by various Broadway actors. Wilson has trained at the Upright Citizens Brigade in New York and The Groundlings in Los Angeles.

"Alejandro" is from Lady Gaga's 2009 album "The Fame Monster."  You can view a full version of the original video here and the spoof version here. Neither video is appropriate for younger viewers, so consider yourselves warned. 

-- David Ng

Photo: a scene from the spoof of "Alejandro." Credit: The Battery's Down

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If you liked "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time" at the movie theater, you'll love "The Spectacular Art of Jean-Léon Gérôme" at the J. Paul Getty Museum. More than a century ago, Gérôme helped to invent the genre of sword-and-sandal epic, later peddled in the movies by everyone from Steve Reeves to Jake Gyllenhaal. Paint and canvas were the French artist's tools of choice, since the machinery of cinema did not yet exist in 1870s Paris.

I realize this may not be much of a recommendation for the Getty show, given the lackluster recent reception of "Prince of Persia" among critics and at the box office. But there are other reasons to see it. Not least is its rarity. There hasn't been a sizable survey of the academic painter, who was hugely successful during his lifetime, since 1972 -- the centennial, in fact, of his sword-and-sandal invention.

Operatic soprano Renée Fleming's latest album, "Dark Hope," has received quite a bit of press in the past few weeks, mainly because she doesn't perform any opera in it.

"Dark Hope" features the renowned American singer performing renditions of songs by indie-rock bands such as Arcade Fire, Death Cab for Cutie, Mars Volta and Muse.

Recently, a music video of Fleming singing Muse's "Endlessly" has surfaced on YouTube. Wearing a black leather jacket, the singer casually strolls the fashionably run-down landscape of a hipster New York, her famous soprano voice lowered an octave or so to a sultry purr.

Watch closely and you'll catch a cameo by actor Matthew Modine, playing Fleming's lover in the video. You get bonus points for spotting the singer's two young daughters, Amelia and Sage. Double bonus points for catching a brief glimpse of film director Abel Ferrara ("Bad Lieutenant").

Early reviews for "Dark Hope" have been mixed.