With a surrealist eye and a pop-culture canvas, video artist Jeremy Blake pushed modernist art into the digital age. Blake’s videos are supersaturated, stream-of-consciousness musings on the freaky and the famous that blur the lines between art forms. One part abstract painter, one part auteur, Blake skipped readily from gallery into the mainstream: Beck used his album art and video for 2002’s Sea Change, and Paul Thomas Anderson commissioned him to animate hallucinatory sequences for Punch-Drunk Love. Blake’s real-life story is as surreal as his art. Last summer, longtime girlfriend Theresa Duncan committed suicide amid rumors of paranoia and a mysterious clash with Scientologists. Days later, Blake took his own life: In a final retreat from the modern cultural ephemera that comprised his art, he swam out to sea and never came back. Citigroup senior art advisor Jonathan Binstock profiles Blake’s life and work in a talk titled “Cinematic Portraits by Jeremy Blake.” Binstock speaks at 7 p.m. at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 500 17th St. NW. $10. For reservations call (202) 639-1774. —-Amanda Hess