UCLA Broad Art Center opens! "LA is one of the great art capitals of the world"

[edluva]

"LA not being a global arch. powerhouse" does not exactly = "LA is this teeming, unsightly quicksand that unequivocally sinks even the noblest of architects' works into the sticky residue of mediocrity."

^^99% sophism. anyways, you're just as guilty of injecting hypotheticals into my replies. And I never tied LA's ability to water-down talent with it's inabilty to produce globally recognized architecture...and your disingenuous attempts to paint it as such is pretty low.

..... I was only trying to say that your loud dissenting opinion that the bldgs that LA is known for (in a positive manner I might add, for I'm sure we're infamous for various trash), are not deserving of the praise they get, is in conspicuous contrast to the innumerable art critics out there (and if you're an iconoclastic, as-of-yet closeted art crit posting on here, prove it: that's what I meant regarding the credentials. I enjoy dissenting opinions, but not when they're baseless). Where in my post did I mention that Hollyhock is the precise equivalent to Guggenheim?

I want you to read the following statement...

to you Hollyhock or Disney or Neutra or whatever architectural piece that hundreds of critics recognize in LA as being legitimate or notable and worthy of adulation as "second-tier," but until you can post some serious art credentials it's just another irrelevant, amateur opinion

^^if you're assertion is that Hollyhock is "first tier", meaning comparably significant to Guggenheim, then I'm correcting you. Otherwise, it's second tier, because, frankly, it's does not represent FLW's seminal work. If you misunderstood me, then it's you that has comprehension problems. Again, don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying Hollyhock deserves the wrecking ball...it's a great building. But it's nowhere near as defining for FLW's architectural career and his legendary rivarly with International Style architects and nowhere near as pivotal for the development of american architecture as the guggenheim, falling water, or even his Johnson Wax building. If you need Douglas Haskell to personally endorse this to you then you do not know much about architecture. Anyhow, I'm riling against those of you who pratice the intellectually lazy tendency of confounding mere association with real significance (that's what i'm attacking, jlrobe). For instance, I bet many here are having wet dreams of BCAM's opening day just because Piano's name is on it, while people who care the slightest bit about architecture are already moving on to other developments, or are at least capable of making a convincing statement about what they do like about it.

. As to whether LA has had a major arch. movement, no, but then this city has had severe height and building restrictions for most of its significant history, (and to compare any American city to Chicago or NY in that regard is kind of pointless)...and yet it still produced at least one indigenous arch. style: Googie (which fits well with the other pop and modern art that LA has foregrounded). Most American cities can't even claim that.

I'm not challenging anybody to justify why LA lacks the very things they simultaneously use (self-defeatingly) to bolster LA as some powerhouse. I don't really care for justifications. I'm challenging baseless claims to begin with. LA ain't an architectural powerhouse, at least not going by the measure of what buildings it can muster. Leave it there if you can't make an argument against it. You can console your bruised ego on your own blog.


And for the external facade of a museum of contemp. art to resemble costco's outdoor dining area seems appropriately befitting, don't you think? What could be more LA than bringing "high art" (not that BCAM will be, but...) down to that level of consumerism and functionality? With the absurdist, massive suspended-train that was planned to be planted outside, I think the disposable-pomo aspect of the bldg will duly be complete and "ready to go." :)

whatever.

[edluva]

btw jlrobe, i don't hate LA as much as you think. i'm more focused on the fact that so few angelenos truly understand and accept LA for what it really is because they're too busy perpetuating stereotypes and other ignorant, wishful ideas about a city which does not exist.

[Vangelist]

Hahaha! edluva you "bruising my ego" on a message board is about as likely as Eli Broad washing my windows, naked. You charge me with sophistry when my contention that LA isn't full of second-tier bldgs alone, was fairly straightforward as anyone who's been reading this thread can attest. You're the one who tried to provoke me into some sort of "moment of truth" challenge, and when I call you out you want to go back and charge me with making strawmen comments I never did for you to tear down, as jlrobe noted. I wouldn't call Hollyhock "second-tier" - maybe not FLW's "best," but "seminal" et al are all arguable points - and I'm sure there are some who'd agree or disagree with me. But go on and try to spin this into me being an ignorant rube and you the erudite snob that shouldn't bother even talking to a heretic LA-defender like me...and then stop talking to me.

I still don't see why you bother posting here when you're usually at odds with everyone all the time. As jlrobe said, I wouldn't call most of us "boosters" (we know the ones that are), but we have balanced perspectives....yet what's wrong with a little bit of boosterism anyway? LA could use more of it

[Vangelist]

Anyone who thinks that by posting here they're going to change other posters' attitudes into accepting Los Angeles "for what it is," by valiantly slaying stereotypes and "ignorant, wishful ideas" is kidding themselves. Los Angeles is different things to different inhabitants, first of all. And lots of people emotionally identify with their hometowns about as much as they do with their families (or sports teams!), and getting them to grow more objective and alter their conceptions of their town isn't even possible. Rather than focusing on what other posters think of LA, one should focus on the city itself and discuss solutions to improve its myriad problems - that's the best that I think these forums can be used for

[jlrobe]

btw jlrobe, i don't hate LA as much as you think. i'm more focused on the fact that so few angelenos truly understand and accept LA for what it really is because they're too busy perpetuating stereotypes and other ignorant, wishful ideas about a city which does not exist.

I dont think that's true. I think many people see LA in the best light possible, but they also recongize its limitations. They know that crime, education, air quality, transit, city planning, land use, and political beauacracy are all problems that need to be addressed. Most of these people are not ignorant, they just choose not to constantly talk about LA's ills. It isnt that they dont realize there is bad news to tell, they just prefer to talk about positive news instead.

Let’s be frank. LA has MANY drawbacks and failures to go along with its benefits and successes. I don’t think you hate LA per-se, I just think you are a pessimist that likes to focus on LA’s drawbacks and failures instead of its benefits and success. I also think whenever someone says something positive you automatically assume that they don’t realize that LA has negatives as well.

Take art for example. LA is a fantastic art town no matter how you slice it, but a pessimist will say "It is nothing compared to NYC" while an optimist will say "It is the second most important contemporary art center in America period and will catch NYC soon", while a realist will say "LA had made great strides over the last decade to soldify its position as an important arts center, but it still has a ways to go. With its many museums, galleries, artists, and creative industries, it is poised to improve even more, but philantropy, urban sprawl, lack of cooperation, lack of government involvement, and an apathetic populace continue to be challenges in LA’s improving art scene”.

Maybe you are a realist that can ackowledge LA’s good points while telling the inconvenient truths, but many times, you just come off as a jaded pessimist.

In conclusiong, hate is a very strong word, and if you really hated LA so much, you wouldn’t have spent the time getting to know it so well. If anything, it is a love-hate relationship.

[jlrobe]

I still don't see why you bother posting here when you're usually at odds with everyone all the time. As jlrobe said, I wouldn't call most of us "boosters" (we know the ones that are), but we have balanced perspectives....yet what's wrong with a little bit of boosterism anyway? LA could use more of it

I argee with you vangelist. I think edluva is convinced that LA is filled with 3 million ignorant boosters, when in reality, almost EVREYONE I know dislikes many things about LA. They could care less about LA politics. Most of them are jaded expats. The amount of negativity in LA is massive. Sure there are a few loud boosters like corporations and the like, but most NORMAL people dont have a ton of civic pride for LA.

LA does need a little boosterism at times.

On another note:
I made a comment about LA's economy on a different post. I know LA needs to focus on elevating our lower class to middle class. I know we need more living wages. I know we need to be more business friendly accorss the board. I know LA has a large problem with job growth. At the same time, I also know that LA is an economic powerhouse, despite its ills and lack of job growth.

You might hear me declare "LA is the second or third most important region in the US" and I believe that is true. At the same time you will hear me say that LA has many problems that it needs to fix in order to maintain its prominence.

I feel MOST people on here are fair and balanced-ISH like myself, but we make very positive comments. If you were to ask any of us if we thought LA needed a lot of improvement, all of us would say "HECK-YES".

[edluva]

Vangelist: when did you ever "call me out" on anything? I don't have to spin anything to demonstrate your ignorance of architecture. Your bullshit above speaks for itself. As far as balanced perspectives, I think you should speak for yourself. "we" is not the appropriate word here.

jlrobe - fair enough. I do think it's a stretch to say the most prolific LA forumers are "fair and balanced". To be blunt most of them are complete idiots, who understand little about this city. Such comments as "powerlines are why this city is a hix in the stix" and the several of us who adamantly deride photos of the less flattering parts of this city as being "unrepresentative", and the numerous other forumers who consistently spout idiotic half-truth's, or rely on promotional literature to formulate their opinions, testify to this fact. In fact, if not for damien, westangelino, chrisla, practicalvisionary, and a couple others, the entire LAforum would be diluted into a childish clown-gang. Don't confuse idiocy with positivity. I certainly have not. regarding your comment about boosters, I'm not railing against boosterism in the general populace, but rather, on this forum - and even then, it's because it's such uneducated, parochial boosterism more likely to come from the San Antonio forum and not, you know, a "world class city". Regarding the general populace it's quite the contrary. i've never in my life encountered a more disinterested group of developed-world big-city denizens than those of LA.

...moving on

[citywatch]

Psuedo intellectuals have a way of talking out of both sides of their mouth, or in a circle, or refusing to say a spade is a spade. And sometimes, if not often, sounding absurdly bitter & unhappy too.

Oh, & "mission viejo on steroids" & a sarcastically mouthed "world class city" don't sound any more erudite than "hix in the stix".


oh, i didn't even notice that. just icing on the cake. come to think of it, beverly hills and mission viejo architecture does literally look like the icing on cakes. very sophisticated stuff...i'd say a step above the orsini, even. but no surprise. we are, after all, a "world class city".

bev hills has the sophistication of a mission viejo on steroids.

[edluva]

^on cue

[citywatch]

Sure there are a few loud boosters like corporations and the like, but most NORMAL people dont have a ton of civic pride for LA.Among major cities in the world, LA has been notorious for its lack of civic enthusiasm or pride. The rather sheepish reaction or backhanded pride, if you will, of one of the city's most well known civic leaders (http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showpost.php?p=14281782&postcount=40), where she can't be assertive & confident about LA's appearance, is a good example of the crux of the problem.

Still, the city has done well in spite of, not because of, its various schleppy looking areas. Nonetheless, it will be nice if one day ppl can say "Los Angeles is a place for the kind of people who are willing to try something new. It's a place for people who want to build a new world......And it's a great looking place too!"

[jlrobe]

jlrobe - fair enough. I do think it's a stretch to say the most prolific LA forumers are "fair and balanced". To be blunt most of them are complete idiots, who understand little about this city. Such comments as "powerlines are why this city is a hix in the stix" and the several of us who adamantly deride photos of the less flattering parts of this city as being "unrepresentative", and the numerous other forumers who consistently spout idiotic half-truth's, or rely on promotional literature to formulate their opinions, testify to this fact. In fact, if not for damien, westangelino, chrisla, practicalvisionary, and a couple others, the entire LAforum would be diluted into a childish clown-gang. Don't confuse idiocy with positivity. I certainly have not. regarding your comment about boosters, I'm not railing against boosterism in the general populace, but rather, on this forum - and even then, it's because it's such uneducated, parochial boosterism more likely to come from the San Antonio forum and not, you know, a "world class city". Regarding the general populace it's quite the contrary. i've never in my life encountered a more disinterested group of developed-world big-city denizens than those of LA.

...moving on

Fair enough. Damien, chrisla, practicalvisionary are almost academic in their approach to urban commentary. I consider myself a fan of music, cuisine and art, but many of my "more laid back" colleagues consider me a music, food, and art snob. I think many people on this forum are not as backward as you think, but they certainly arent snobs/academic/true urban enthusiasts.

I dont consider damien, practicalvisionary, et al, to be snobs, but just on a higher level than their "peers". I am sure you consider yourselves the proper status quo, but in reality, you are just on a different level. Yes, people on this board, and in LA in general, lack the sophistication of other alpha cities, but that doenst make them mindless cheerleaders. I enjoy New York and SF's sophistication, but often times, I find those cities HORRIBLY pretentious, and I actually enjoy the low key vibe of LA. I dont like blatant ignorance, or botox wives who lunch, but on the whole, I like LA's relaxed populace, just like I enjoy this forum.

I agree. If you go onto a london forum, people are much more well connected to their town, but london is a long established city with a long established civic character. LA is, and always has been, in rapid flux with no identifiable character to speak of. The comments on the two boards will always be different, until LA settles on a more permanent urban DNA.

[Quixote]

^ I wouldn't go as far as to say the people on this board "lack sophistication." I generally consider all of us to be on a level above the typical Angeleno. We exhibit civic pride and concern for the local community, something LA generally lacks among its nonchalant residents. Even edluva, as candid and critical as he may be, cares about LA.

You can still have some rather thought-provoking conversations here, unlike over at SSC. Though I think that air of intellectuality as of late has degenerated into pissing-contests and ad hominem attacks. As cliched as it may sound, can't we all just get along?

[jlrobe]

^ I wouldn't go as far as to say the people on this board "lack sophistication."
It is hard for me to fully express myself online. Sometimes I equate "sophisticated" as boderline snobby. I use that word in so many different ways. It was not my intention to imply that people on these boards are simpletons. They are not! I am just saying that many people on this board don't think things so darn seriously all the time.

PS: Don't worry edluva. Not that you care, but I am not calling you, or others a snob.

[Affrojuice]

Artist Chris Burden's collection of restored streetlights will cast LACMA in 'Urban Light.'

By Susan Freudenheim, Special to The Times
January 30, 2008

http://i264.photobucket.com/albums/ii169/affrojuice/LACMA.jpg

"I'VE been driving by these buildings for 40 years, and it's always bugged me how this institution turned its back on the city," Chris Burden said the other day as he sat in a new public plaza facing Wilshire Boulevard at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Linking the soon-to-open Broad Contemporary Art Museum and the museum's original campus, this plaza is taking shape as the setting for Burden's largest sculpture to date, "Urban Light," an installation of 202 restored and fully operational vintage streetlights.

Wilshire is one of the main thoroughfares of the city, but LACMA's multiple tall, imposing and mostly unadorned facades have done little to address the endless stream of traffic that flows by, Burden noted. There's nothing like the grand Beaux Arts entry staircase that serves as a meeting place and a lure for visitors to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. "What faces Wilshire," Burden said, "hasn't been very inviting."

The opening of the BCAM, designed by Renzo Piano to hold contemporary art, will mark a new beginning for the 42-year-old museum, and Burden, 61, hopes that his monumental installation of 1920s and '30s-era lamps will become both a city landmark and a more fitting entryway to the sprawling campus. Nearly all of Burden's cast-iron lamps once lighted the streets of this region, and their variety in a very literal way represents distinct styles that distinguish different neighborhoods -- present and past. Arranged so the visitor can walk among the fixtures, "Urban Light" is a nod, Burden said, to what a museum should be: "It sounds kind of corny, but when you walk through the lamps into the museum, it's like a pathway to enlightenment. It's symbolic."

Arranged in strict formation, with the tallest standing about 30 feet in the center at the back, flanked by others of various heights and forms, with the smallest standing about 20 feet tall, the lamps look like a platoon of soldiers ready to march. All their parts are original, collected by Burden over seven years. The bases display elaborate floral and geometric patterns, and the fluted shafts and glass globes that cap them have been meticulously cleaned, painted and refurbished to create an exuberant glow. The first lighting is scheduled for Feb. 7 as one of BCAM's kick-off events, and "Urban Light" will illuminate mid-Wilshire's evening sky regularly thereafter.

A fanatical collector

Burden found his first lamps on a trip to the monthly Rose Bowl Flea Market in December 2000. Although he may still be best known for his provocative conceptual art from the 1970s, including having himself shot in the arm as a performance piece, he has been making large-scale assemblage sculpture for the last three decades. He is also an avaricious collector: Trains (toy and full-sized), cars (real and miniature), Erector sets and oriental rugs are just a few of the categories that he has amassed in vast quantities, either with a design in mind for specific artworks or with a vague notion of future use

Lamps had been on his mind as well -- he liked the forms -- and he'd been eyeing reproductions at Home Depot. So seeing "the real thing," as he put it, a couple of worn lamp shafts lying on the ground, grabbed him. He quickly asked the price: "They're $950 each," Burden remembers the dealer telling him, which he then bargained down to $800 if Burden would take the pair.

"I whipped out my checkbook and wrote him a check for $1,600," Burden said. He asked if there were more and was told "maybe." It was the beginning of a cat-and-mouse relationship in a subculture of fanatical collectors who care deeply about cast iron and see the beauty in preserving pieces of the past, and whose interest keeps prices steadily rising.

Burden didn't have a plan for the lamps at first, though he said that after he'd gotten about six he knew they would become part of his art. The number grew to 70, then 100 and onward, and the lamp obsession seemed unstoppable.

Some of the lamps were mostly intact -- though always needing some repair -- but more often Burden turned up stray parts, which he, his crew and a group of lighting experts he came to know reassembled and wired into working lamps. Over the years the landscape surrounding Burden's Topanga Canyon studio became dotted with what he calls "lamp carcasses" in varying states of disrepair, pole upon pole lying flat on the ground waiting to be renewed and reused.

He chose to paint them all a neutral gray, giving the variety a modicum of uniformity, and he imagined placing them in minimal arrangements. They became, at his hand, the ready-made material for large-scale installation art.

For a solo show at New York's Gagosian Gallery in late 2003, Burden suggested installing more than 100 of the lamps inside the Chelsea space, creating a "forest of lamps," a series of lamp-filled rooms that would represent "bringing L.A. light and culture to New York."

The show would have been big and expensive, and it had a tight timeline, so eventually the gallery decided against it, even though Burden said it had invested heavily in the project. That left him with about 150 lamps, many at least partially restored, and no immediate plan for them.

He decided to install them at his studio, placing them in orderly rows set in concrete on the exterior periphery of his hangar-like studio.

Still, Burden wanted to show the lamps, and in late 2006, 14 of them traveled to London for an exhibition. But the real goal was to keep as many as possible together, and he began to invite people to visit the studio, turning the lights on at night to display their luminescence but showing the installation during the day as well. Burden loved the lamps' craftsmanship and history -- the tallest and most ornate came from downtown Los Angeles, others from Anaheim, Glendale, Hollywood and a few from Portland, Ore., according to Anna Justice, a specialized contractor who is working on the LACMA installation and who sold about 60 lamps to Burden.

Plenty of suitors

Among the many Topanga visitors was Stephanie Barron, LACMA's senior curator of modern art, who has helped acquire and exhibit Burden's work for the museum for decades. Anticipating LACMA's 2008 expansion, Barron encouraged others at the museum to visit the Topanga studio, and when Michael Govan became LACMA director in spring 2006 -- fresh from the Dia Art Foundation in New York, which specializes in large-scale contemporary installations -- Barron suggested Govan go up to scope it out.

"Very soon into being here I went to Topanga Canyon," Govan said in a recent interview. "It was twilight, and the lights were lit, and I didn't even have to get up the drive. It was so obvious." He wanted to buy the work on the spot -- not an easy thing for a county-owned museum with limited acquisition funds and a committee that needs to review purchases. There was motivation to be quick too. The MAK Museum for Applied Art in Vienna, which had previously organized a major Burden retrospective, had dibs on the lamps, intending to bring them to Austria.

"I said, 'No way,' " Govan remembered. "On many levels it was clear that it was perfect for LACMA. It had architectonic scale, it would draw people into the campus, it would give us a sense of place." "Urban Light" comprised Los Angeles' history and diversity, Govan said, and it was by a major L.A. artist.

Govan went to work and invited Burden to talk to his board. Andrew M. Gordon, head of Goldman Sachs & Co. Investment Banking Division on the West Coast and a leader at the museum (in October, Gordon became chairman of the LACMA board), saw the presentation and went to the studio with his wife, Amy.

"We were blown away," Gordon said. Although the couple had not been big "contemporary art participants," Gordon said, they decided to buy a work consisting of 150 lamps for the museum for an unnamed price through the Gordon Family Foundation. Burden, seeing the harmony in keeping the lamps in L.A., agreed.

Once he started planning the lamps' configuration at LACMA, though, "I realized they had to have more of them," Burden said.

He still owned 52 more lamps, but adding such a large number to the project raised the price, not only of the sculpture itself but also of the complex installation. Each lamp has to be installed to code, and the production is being overseen by experts from the city's Bureau of Street Lighting as well as an elaborate array of specialized contractors.

Burden made his request to vastly expand the project with no assurance that it would happen. Govan, who agreed immediately, says, "The Gordons came through in an incredibly gracious way."

The experience of looking carefully at "Urban Light" as a work of art, exploring the details of the individual objects, has the added benefit of making other similar city lamps still in operation suddenly stand out. And their forgotten beauty -- both in Burden's lamps and on the streets -- is a pleasure to discover. "All that detail in the casting is what I wanted people to look at," Burden said.

But Burden also sees in "Urban Light" something grander -- "architecture without walls."

"It's a folly," Burden said, an extravagant, grand and deeply meaningful gesture about Los Angeles' past -- complex, finely crafted and made to last.

For his part, Govan sees in "Urban Light" echoes of a Roman temple or colonnade without walls that is also a collection of representatives of all the communities of Los Angeles County -- appropriate for the county's art museum. The work will, Govan hopes, allow museum entrants to participate in "a coming together of this dispersed county into a concentrated symbol of light."

And that is, he said, "much better than a red carpet."

Susan Freudenheim is managing editor of the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles

[ocman]

Bloomberg mentions that the LA art fair may move to the convention center if it gets too big. Meanwhile, Art LA had low attendance that was blamed on the rains, so it looks as if ART LA may be the HD DVD equivalent of this art fair competition to see which can rival Basel in Miami.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601088&sid=aLtSjBduoCcE&refer=muse

[Steve2726]

This webcam has a good look at the entire LACMA campus now that a much of the construction has ended. Sorry if this is a repost.

http://www.lacma.org/info/TransformWebcam.aspx

http://transcam.lacma.org/axis-cgi/mjpg/video.cgi?resolution=4CIF&dummy=1202744004095

and here is a southeast facing shot of the new BCAM building from the LACMA website:

http://www.lacma.org/info/images/bcamwb.jpg

[dweebo2220]

I hope a time will come soon when people will realize that LA has it's own cultural paradigm in which, in my opinion, a revered Piano, a 'seminal Wright,' even the Disney Concert Hall just does not fit. We do not compete on that level, and I don't think we should.

The LA that inspires me is the crazy-pastiche informal local vernacular one, and I find it offensive when an architect like piano 'references' costcos or movie theatres or whatever other bullshit stereotype outsiders think LA is "all about." When you actually walk or drive the streets of this city, you can see much subtler common influences in the architecture that make this place unique. LA has historically been a dreamers paradise, and I want to see more joie de vivre in new buildings.

The first new "prestige" building to be built in LA that impresses me will not be a rational teutonic rip-off or a calculated cultural statement, but a thoughtfully exuberant work that shows a sophisticated understanding of global culture and presents the best of Los Angeles in all its casually complex glory.

basically, can we get Gehry to go back to the 80's again?

[ocman]

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200803/editors-choice

Editor’s Choice: When postwar modernism went west, it dropped the angst—and transformed a culture.

by Benjamin Schwarz
California Cool

From the late 1940s to the early 1960s, a small group of painters in Southern California made the region an internationally prominent modern-art center and defined an “L.A. Look” recognizable to this day; Los Angeles’s architects produced the most influential and winning collection of modernist houses ever built; its designers created America’s most seminal and enduring modern furniture designs; and its musicians mounted the only significant challenge to New York’s jazz supremacy in the past 60 years. A number of penetrating books—Peter Plagens’s Sunshine Muse: Art on the West Coast, 1945–1970; Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies; Pat Kirkhams’s Charles and Ray Eames: Designers of the Twentieth Century; Elizabeth Smith’s Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses; and Ted Gioia’s West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945–1960—have probed discrete aspects of this remarkable cultural flowering. But the first to connect the various artistic forms that modernism took in the region is the unusually intelligent and lavishly illustrated Birth of the Cool, by Elizabeth Armstrong, with essays by six prominent art critics (the epony­mous art exhibition is currently touring the country). More important, the book provocatively suggests that a common sensibility animated all those forms. It thereby illuminates the substance of style—that is, how an aesthetic both shapes and is shaped by viewpoint and temperament, proclivities and prejudices.

Nearly every aspect of this sudden efflorescence can be traced to long- developing regional trends and affections, or was at the least firmly anchored in Southern California’s eccentric economic, social, climatological, and even technological environment. For instance, Southern California produced little noteworthy modern art before the austere, crisply defined “Hard-Edge” geometric paintings, with their uninflected colors, that Lorser Feitelson, John McLaughlin, Frederick Hammers­ley, Karl Benjamin, Helen Lundeberg, and June Harwood created beginning in the early 1950s. And when it did, those works were uniquely tied to Southern California conditions. The paintings were in part inspired by the pure, clean lines of Los Angeles’s Case Study houses and the city’s other modernist dwellings. (Appropriately enough, Birth of the Cool devotes one full essay and a significant part of another to these houses, and their images are reproduced throughout the book.) The region’s strong, clear light, which at once sharpens and idealizes forms and creates uncannily crisp shadows, was undoubtedly the essential factor in the development of the Hard-Edge style (though, surprisingly, Birth of the Cool fails to note it).
Birth of the Cool

Similarly, the elegant yet sprightly, pavilion-like glass-and-steel Case Study houses, designed for Los Angeles’s swelling postwar professional middle class, could only be realized with new techniques and materials, many of which had emerged from the region’s war industries. As Elizabeth Smith notes in an essay in this book, “technologically oriented” Southern California proved unusually receptive to residential applications of those innovative industrial methods and materials, which were easily available in the region. Furthermore (as I’ve pointed out in these pages), the houses’ interweaving of outdoor and indoor space and their breezy informality put them in the tradition of a uniquely Californian way of living and domestic architecture going back to Schindler and Neutra’s modernist L.A. houses of the 1920s–’40s and, earlier, the stripped-down Craftsman bungalows of the 1910s and ’20s.

And, for that matter, the low-key, untroubled fluency of the California cool jazz of Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, Shorty Rogers, Buddy Collette, Shelly Manne, Bill Holman, and Bud Shank clearly grew out of West Coast musicians’ peculiar historical affinity for the easy swing of the Count Basie Orchestra. The music’s even-tempered, insouciant ap­proach owed a lot to the sunny city in which the musicians found themselves, just as the relatively easy life that 1950s Los Angeles offered to musicians, composers, and arrangers (the steady work from movie and recording studios obviated incessant touring) gave rise to the music’s characteristically polished, heavily arranged, cerebral quality.

Moreover, even if the innovative designs of the high-minded and enor-mously successful Venice, California–based husband-and-wife partnership of Charles and Ray Eames, whose hugely influential work figures in nearly every essay in this book, might seem to lie outside a Los Angeles context and tradition (the region had never before had designers of mass-produced, avant-garde furniture), the couple’s creations in fact depended on new lightweight materials and inventive ways of fusing them—materials that would have been impossible to develop outside of Southern California, home of leading-edge military and aeronautical industries. It was to fashion leg splints for the U.S. Navy during World War II that the Eameses had initially developed the plywood-molding system that allowed for the production of their DCM chair—a piece of furniture the British architectural historian Reyner Banham has declared no less than “the most compelling artefact of its generation.” The couple invested the astringencies of modernism with the whimsy, playfulness, and love of juxtaposition that had long been attributes of the Southern California good life—see, for instance, their Case Study house, with its child’s-play panels of bright color and its marriage of warmly natural and austerely industrial materials—reflecting what Armstrong in her essay nicely characterizes as the region’s “ideal of informal domesticity.”


Birth of the Cool proposes that the connections and commonalities among California’s mid-century modernist musicians, architects, and painters include a collective sensibility—“cool,” an emphasis on restraint and detachment— that was rooted in but hardly confined to aesthetics. Nearly every aspect of California modernism developed in rebellion—not against the usual anti-modernism but against other manifestations of modernism, East Coast or European, that emphasized the heroic and the emotionally expressive. Hard-Edge painting (originally dubbed “Abstract Classicism”) elevated calculation, a Zen-influenced harmony, and formal austerity (qualities that didn’t exclude, especially in Lundeberg’s work, the lyrical) explicitly in opposition to the overheated romanticism and gestural and emotional fervency of Abstract Expressionism, specifically Pollock’s action painting. The work of the Hard-Edge painters, their first collective exhibition catalog in 1959 asserted, “runs counter to a widespread contemporary belief in the primary value of emotion and intuition in esthetic experience … the [Hard-Edge painter] is not preoccupied with art as an opportunity to make autobiographical statements. He is not a narcissist in paint, nor does he turn to art for the succor of the confessional.”

In the same vein, even as the Case Study architects purified the International Style, they also feminized and downscaled it (seldom have great architects lavished such attention nearly exclusively on the small single-family house) with their jaunty touch, and eschewed what Banham called “that heroic-style creative angst of the European-based modern movement.” This permitted a quality incompatible with passion, artistic and otherwise: wit. Along with their photographer of choice, Julius Shulman—whose photographs capture “the essence of ‘cool,’” Smith says, and who was one of the very rare photographers who put people in architectural shots—the Case Study architects imbued the married partners at the heart of domesticity with an arch, slightly quizzical, offhandedly erotic underplay that modulated and refined family life and bourgeois sexuality. (With its severe geometries and saturated colors, Shulman’s photo of Pierre Koenig and a model in his Case Study House #21 seems plainly influenced by Hard-Edge painting.) Finally, in both its architects’ and designers’ focus on the domestic—that is, the private and the sheltered—California modernism fostered a detachment, even a quietism, that in itself militated against zeal and emotional heedlessness.

Similarly, what the critic Whitney Balliet called the “pervasive suavity” of West Coast jazz—an understated and cleanly articulated playing that stayed close to the melody, tempered improvisation with control, and shunned blatant virtuosity—developed in response to the raw expression, the ostentatious and athletic displays (along with squawks and jagged accents) that characterized the increasing excesses of bop and hard bop, the dominant jazz styles back east. Cool jazz, especially its vocalists, injected the music with nonchalance and a sense of irony—qualities wholly absent from the jazz mainstream. The L.A.–based singers June Christy (the well-scrubbed former canary of the Stan Kenton Orchestra, the only great Los Angeles big band), Peggy Lee (onstage, she didn’t emote; she arched an eyebrow), and Frank Sinatra (especially on his up-tempo numbers, which convey the sense that romance is a lovely, transitory lark), all of whom recorded for Los Angeles’s trend-setting Capitol Records, interpreted lyrics with a resigned intelligence and a refined detachment. Listen to Christy’s signature “Something Cool,” about a tawdry lounge pickup, told from the perspective of the self-deluded female barfly: such knowing­ness entirely eluded the fervent (and earnest) Billie Holiday, Dinah Washington, and Nina Simone.

Birth of the Cool evokes a profoundly distant period in American popular culture, aesthetics, style, and sensibility— and not only because it assesses the artifacts of a time and place of singular ebullience and prosperity. Postwar cool yielded to the ’60s, the most engaged, committed, and overwrought decade in our cultural history, a decade whose romantic excesses still haunt us. To be sure, a “cool” aesthetic could lapse easily into the commercially slick; witness the career of the West Coast jazzman Henry Mancini. But self-awareness, to say nothing of good manners and a sense of proportion, aesthetic and otherwise, demands a healthy measure of the cool. After all, as that consummate bard of cool Joan Didion once remarked, it’s impossible to maintain “any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a cold shower.”

[ocman]

http://www.calendarlive.com/tv/radio/cl-et-lacma12mar12,0,1039204.story

LACMA buys land across the street from BCAM. Possibly for a subway stop and/or future expansion of the museum complex.

[Quixote]

http://www.latimes.com/media/photo/2008-03/36654434.jpg
‘ARII MATAMOE’: The painting is expected to be on view at the Getty early next month.

Gauguin on a Platter

Getty's long-sought buy from a private owner fills 'clear need.'

By Suzanne Muchnic, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 12, 2008

Marking the end of an eight-year quest and the expenditure of untold millions of dollars, the J. Paul Getty Museum has acquired a signature Tahitian painting by French artist Paul Gauguin.

"Arii Matamoe (The Royal End)," a richly colored but curiously morbid image, depicts the severed head of a Polynesian man on a white pillow, set on a small purple table in an elaborately decorated room. The artist painted the 18-by-30-inch work in oil on roughly textured cloth in 1892, during his first sojourn in Tahiti.

The Getty, which purchased the painting from a private Swiss collection through Parisian dealer Daniel Malingue, plans to put it on view in early April.

"This is a very satisfying acquisition for us," said Michael Brand, director of the museum, scrutinizing the work on an easel in the museum's paintings conservation lab Tuesday. "It's an answer to the question people always ask about what you would like to add to your collection. We had a clear need for a great painting by Gauguin to accompany our Post-Impressionist masterpieces by Van Gogh and Cezanne."

Describing the addition as "a key moment" in the history of the museum's collection, Brand said the Gauguin also exemplifies the artist's fascination with Polynesian civilization and his connection to the French Symbolists.

Scott Schaefer, the Getty's curator of paintings, said the artwork is "the most famous painting by Gauguin that no one has seen."

Although widely published and well-known to scholars, the painting has been out of the public eye for decades because the former owner usually declined to lend it to exhibitions.

Schaefer and Getty paintings conservator Mark Leonard became aware that "Arii Matamoe" might be available for sale and went to Switzerland to see it eight years ago. They found a work that was in pristine condition and immediately knew they wanted it. The museum soon put the artwork "on hold" with the dealer, but the process of acquiring it took a long time because of changes in leadership at the Getty and because of other major acquisitions already under discussion or in process.

Brand, who took charge of the museum two years ago, said that waiting for the right Gauguin instead of grabbing one of many lesser examples it had been offered points up the virtue of "long-term curatorial planning and patience." Although the Getty did not disclose the price it paid, Gauguin paintings have brought as much as $39.2 million at auction.

Gauguin, who lived from 1848 to 1903, abandoned his banking job in France to become a full-time painter in 1885. He made his first trip to Tahiti in 1891, hoping to find inspiration in a tropical paradise where he could live close to nature. He became obsessed with the landscape and native lifestyle, but much of what he painted was a fantasy that incorporated various aspects of art history.

The severed head, which Schaefer called "the ultimate still life," may represent King Pomare V, who died -- but not by decapitation -- soon after the artist's arrival in Tahiti. Schaefer and his fellow curator, Scott Allan, said that the image is a metaphor for the death of Tahitian culture in the face of European colonization and that it may represent the savagery Gauguin expected, but did not find, in Tahiti. The image also recalls severed heads of John the Baptist, Orpheus and other individuals depicted by the French Symbolists.

Gauguin took "Arii Matamoe" back to France in 1893 and exhibited it with about 40 other Tahitian paintings at the Durand-Ruel gallery. It didn't sell during the show, but Henry Lerolle, an academic painter, bought it a few years later. The anonymous Swiss collector acquired the painting in the 1930s.

At the Getty, the Gauguin joins two drawings and a wood-sculpture self-portrait by the artist. The acquisition also complements Gauguin holdings in other local museums. The Norton Simon Museum has a Tahitian painting made during the artist's second trip to the island. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has seven earlier works, made in Brittany. The Hammer Museum also has Brittany-period Gauguin.

Together, Schaefer said, the artworks represent the entire sweep of Gauguin's career.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Source: Los Angeles Times (http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/arts/la-et-gettyart12mar12,1,1965280.story)

[dragonsky]

March 12, 2008
LACMA's latest purchase: land
LACMA purchases a tract across Wilshire from the new Broad Contemporary.

By Anne-Marie O'Connor, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

Further expanding its 20-acre campus, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has purchased a sizable parcel of land across the street from its ambitious new showcase, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, for what sources involved with the deal said was close to $12 million.

City Councilman Tom LaBonge said the parcel would not only expand the Miracle Mile museum district but also possibly serve as a stop on a future subway to the sea.

"This is a victory. Urban lights is what this is all about," LaBonge said, alluding to the Chris Burden sculpture of streetlights newly installed along Wilshire Boulevard at LACMA.

"This is part of the big plan," LaBonge said. "It's all going to be complementary, and one day there's going to be a subway stop there, and everybody in the county can ride transit to that wonderful complex of art museums.

"We should build our city culturally," LaBonge said in a telephone interview from Washington, where he was attending a National League of Cities conference and lobbying Congress on issues such as air quality, the Los Angeles River restoration and Los Angeles International Airport.

LACMA spokeswoman Barbara Pflaumer said she was "delighted" by the acquisition but could offer few details, such as the size of the lot.

"We saw this as an opportunity to develop key parts of the campus," Pflaumer said. "We don't have specific plans for the property. It was an opportunity to buy something, and we bought it. . . . We'd love a subway stop."

Pflaumer said the county did not pay for the purchase but declined to say who had. The reported price was about half of what LACMA paid in 1994 for the May Co. property adjacent to the museum.

LaBonge, whose district includes the site of the purchase, said the parcel encompasses a five-story office building completed in 1960, at the southwest corner of Wilshire and Ogden, and a construction site to the rear of it, which had been planned as a loft complex by a division of Miami-based Lennar Corp.

Kevin Farr, president of the Southern California division of Lennar Urban, which sold the property to LACMA, said the purchase closed escrow in late February.

"They've jumped Wilshire Boulevard," Farr said. "We had been working on a development, but the museum was a much more interested buyer than we were a developer at this point."

Lennar's Southern California urban development group, which builds high-density residential projects, had planned to build "Gallery Lofts," whose address was listed as 6006 Wilshire Blvd.

The projected complex was an upscale residential project intended to "bring loft-style living to new heights" of "metropolitan energy, urban luxury," according to its online brochure.

But at the moment, the project is an unfinished low-rise skeleton that many of its neighbors view as an eyesore.

LaBonge said the LACMA acquisition solidifies a cultural hub in walking distance of the Page Museum, the Petersen Automotive Museum and the Craft and Folk Art Museum.

"You go up three blocks to the Farmers Market and you're in heaven," he said. "Just like in the nation's capital in the Mall, Los Angeles will have a wonderful location. There's a lot of complement when you cluster museums together. It's a great plus."

[edluva]

I hope a time will come soon when people will realize that LA has it's own cultural paradigm in which, in my opinion, a revered Piano, a 'seminal Wright,' even the Disney Concert Hall just does not fit. We do not compete on that level, and I don't think we should.

The LA that inspires me is the crazy-pastiche informal local vernacular one, and I find it offensive when an architect like piano 'references' costcos or movie theatres or whatever other bullshit stereotype outsiders think LA is "all about." When you actually walk or drive the streets of this city, you can see much subtler common influences in the architecture that make this place unique. LA has historically been a dreamers paradise, and I want to see more joie de vivre in new buildings.

The first new "prestige" building to be built in LA that impresses me will not be a rational teutonic rip-off or a calculated cultural statement, but a thoughtfully exuberant work that shows a sophisticated understanding of global culture and presents the best of Los Angeles in all its casually complex glory.

basically, can we get Gehry to go back to the 80's again?

wow, a thoughtful response for change. la does not follow that paradigm, you're right. but the funny thing is that the 80s gehry phenomenon (the appraisal of his work by "calculating" architectural critics) in its ironic way, did. the genius of "seminal wrights" like taliesin or falling water was precisely in their *not* having been calculated cultural statements, but rather, cultural experiment in their own rights. but i find that architects come to LA with good intentions, but find no choice but to calculate becuase LA is extremely difficult for architects to find a local vernacular to channel intuitively. You've heard it ad nauseum here too - LA is impossible to summarize or "get a feel of". LA is cultural miscellany - it's cultural profanity, the perpetual destruction of context. How do you sanctify, or create beauty out of, that which seeks to destroy that very sanctity; our desire to ascribe beauty to it?

or alternatively, what exactly is LA "all about"?

[dweebo2220]

wow, a thoughtful response for change. la does not follow that paradigm, you're right. but the funny thing is that the 80s gehry phenomenon (the appraisal of his work by "calculating" architectural critics) in its ironic way, did. the genius of "seminal wrights" like taliesin or falling water was precisely in their *not* having been calculated cultural statements, but rather, cultural experiment in their own rights. but i find that architects come to LA with good intentions, but find no choice but to calculate becuase LA is extremely difficult for architects to find a local vernacular to channel intuitively. You've heard it ad nauseum here too - LA is impossible to summarize or "get a feel of". LA is cultural miscellany - it's cultural profanity, the perpetual destruction of context. How do you sanctify, or create beauty out of, that which seeks to destroy that very sanctity; our desire to ascribe beauty to it?

or alternatively, what exactly is LA "all about"?

Thanks.

I just think most new buildings that have any imagination at all are just too damn formal. This is true everywhere, not just LA. Even if they have whimsy and color, like say an Alsop (or Gehry's design for Grand Avenue), they still come across as initially looking expensive. I think LA's most representative architecture are the budget flights of fancy, or some of the geometrically exuberant silly postmodern apts/condos especially prevalent in west LA. I like stuff that's actually strange and unique. The CCTV building in Beijing is unique, but not strange. It's ultimately expected. The LAX theme building is unique, and totally strange.

Whenever I experiment with my own architectural designs I draw on the decorative elements of LA architecture. I think decoration will see a big resurgence (and I don't mean things like those ugly ugly stupid unimaginative "horizontal stones" they keep adhering to everything). I love deco. I love googie. I love themes. I don't think we have to get nostalgic to incorporate themes into our buildings again. I hate retro deco, and I hate retro googie. Instead of ripping off a theme that is no longer relevant, like "south seas," I think we can create new styles that are mish-mashes of various elements. I think the most effective and brilliant art deco buildings created their own themes by mixing truly disparate references (unlike beaux arts which I can't stand).

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that LA, as it makes its way into cultural prominence, deserves thoughtfully casual architecture that is effortlessly exuberant, comfortably exotic, and naturally hybridized. I love living in the hodge-podge city. I love that sometimes shifting one block over can mean a shift in complete urban form and style. But I think we've lost touch with the fantasy, the imagination of LA. Imagination does not need to be irresponsible.

By the way, I can't stand Las Vegas. On first glance it seems imaginative, but it quickly reveals itself as a completely joyless place. Sid Grauman thought the Chinese Theater was fucking crazy and amazing and spectacular. Las Vegas is unfortunately a dry and mundane place and I cringe every time a new condo pops up in LA that looks like it was plucked from Henderson..

So yeah, as a native, I can "intuitively channel" the LA vernacular but I think it also takes education and some worldliness to understand what it is that makes LA different. After all, LA was a response to everything else. I think that many transplants still see it as that (a "break" from tradition) while natives are unable to see why this place is remarkable. I hope that soon we will see a new breed of native LA talent that really understands the fascinating territory that LA occupies in world culture.

[StethJeff]

Thanks.

I just think most new buildings that have any imagination at all are just too damn formal. This is true everywhere, not just LA. Even if they have whimsy and color, like say an Alsop (or Gehry's design for Grand Avenue), they still come across as initially looking expensive. I think LA's most representative architecture are the budget flights of fancy, or some of the geometrically exuberant silly postmodern apts/condos especially prevalent in west LA. I like stuff that's actually strange and unique. The CCTV building in Beijing is unique, but not strange. It's ultimately expected. The LAX theme building is unique, and totally strange.

Whenever I experiment with my own architectural designs I draw on the decorative elements of LA architecture. I think decoration will see a big resurgence (and I don't mean things like those ugly ugly stupid unimaginative "horizontal stones" they keep adhering to everything). I love deco. I love googie. I love themes. I don't think we have to get nostalgic to incorporate themes into our buildings again. I hate retro deco, and I hate retro googie. Instead of ripping off a theme that is no longer relevant, like "south seas," I think we can create new styles that are mish-mashes of various elements. I think the most effective and brilliant art deco buildings created their own themes by mixing truly disparate references (unlike beaux arts which I can't stand).

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that LA, as it makes its way into cultural prominence, deserves thoughtfully casual architecture that is effortlessly exuberant, comfortably exotic, and naturally hybridized. I love living in the hodge-podge city. I love that sometimes shifting one block over can mean a shift in complete urban form and style. But I think we've lost touch with the fantasy, the imagination of LA. Imagination does not need to be irresponsible.

By the way, I can't stand Las Vegas. On first glance it seems imaginative, but it quickly reveals itself as a completely joyless place. Sid Grauman thought the Chinese Theater was fucking crazy and amazing and spectacular. Las Vegas is unfortunately a dry and mundane place and I cringe every time a new condo pops up in LA that looks like it was plucked from Henderson..

So yeah, as a native, I can "intuitively channel" the LA vernacular but I think it also takes education and some worldliness to understand what it is that makes LA different. After all, LA was a response to everything else. I think that many transplants still see it as that (a "break" from tradition) while natives are unable to see why this place is remarkable. I hope that soon we will see a new breed of native LA talent that really understands the fascinating territory that LA occupies in world culture.

:previous: wow, good stuff. i couldn't agree more (except for the whole beaux arts thing - i don't mind the style).

by the way, i think that your thorough and thoughtful response just demonstrated why it's so difficult for those of us who love LA to capture or even describe why we have so much affection for the city to those who "don't get it." basically, it requires a lengthy explanation that outsiders are usually left unsatisfied with. :brickwall:

[ocman]

Interesting round table discussion at the LA Times. Govan's comment to the question of organizations competing for dollars is hilarious.



ROUNDTABLE
Five leaders of cultural L.A. weigh the city's past, progress and its potential
The Times brings together Deborah Borda, Plácido Domingo, Michael Govan, Michael Ritchie and James N. Wood for a look at the future.
March 23, 2008

» Discuss Article
THE ARTS COMMUNITY IN LOS ANGELES has always seemed to exist somewhere in the shadows of the glitz, glamour and even scandals of the Hollywood entertainment world. But with the opening of the Getty Center, Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, the appointment of conductor Gustavo Dudamel to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the numerous theater world-premiere offerings and the emergence of the Los Angeles Opera, the "city of the future" is once again trying to establish itself as an internationally recognized cultural center. To explore these changes and discuss the challenges and issues facing arts institutions, The Times recently brought together the leaders of five major institutions in the city. Participating in the roundtable with Times editors and writers were: Deborah Borda, president and chief executive of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Assn.; Plácido Domingo, general director of Los Angeles Opera; Michael Govan, director and chief executive of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Michael Ritchie, artistic director of Center Theatre Group, which includes the Ahmanson Theatre, Mark Taper Forum and the Kirk Douglas Theatre; and James N. Wood, president and chief executive of the Getty Trust. Nearly all of them came to Los Angeles from the East Coast less than three years ago and discovered, to their surprise, a landscape ripe for development. Following is a partial transcript.

Question: Could each of you talk about what attracted you to Los Angeles?

Govan: In the visual arts and particularly in contemporary art, L.A. has emerged very recently as one of the major centers of art production -- and it's on the rise. There's momentum. The trend line here is up. Artists are fantastic indicators of cultural growth of great cities. In many cities, when artists come in, real estate does, or cultural institutions.

RELATED

STORY: Cultural leaders confident of arts' role in L.A.
Having spent so much time in New York [most recently as head of the Dia Art Foundation], with a more Euro-centric approach, you can palpably feel -- in Los Angeles -- this connection to Latin America and to Asia. You feel a balanced perspective of the world situation.

And finally, there's a lot to do here; it's in the process of being made, as a place, culturally. When I first got here we had one of these conversations, and people were standing up and saying, "Well, L.A. already is a cultural capital." And the fact is, it's not by some of the standards. I think that's what was attractive -- that its future was not certain but that its future was uncertain. So that thrill of the uncertainty was as much of it as anything.

Wood: Well, the appeal to me was very selfish: There was a chance for a new life, an unexpected life. After two years of retirement, I didn't think that L.A. was going to be my home. For both my wife and I, actually, it's the ideal place to be at this moment. I've had the good fortune to spend time in New York and in Chicago [after being president of the Chicago Art Institute], and if one is going to be an American patriot, as I consider myself, then you have to know the third layer of this school.

At Getty, I knew I would have to learn at a tremendous pace, and frankly, at my age, that's really exciting. And I have not been disappointed. It's an institution with all kinds of potential, a short track record -- a good one. Many mistakes, many successes. So how it relates to Los Angeles was an opportunity to sort of learn in overtime. And the other really appealing factor, beyond the artists and whatnot, was the people running the other visual arts institutions. I realize that's only one small piece of the cultural scene here, but they're all younger than me, they're all smarter than me, and it's a great community. So the odds of success are very good here.

Domingo: Los Angeles has been, for me, a constant in my life. Whatever happens, I always come back to Los Angeles. It's a city where everybody, everything is developing -- in the museums, in the Philharmonic, with the music, in the Ahmanson. Everything is growing. I thought the relationship with Hollywood was something that we could use -- and that we have been using -- to a great success.

The people are proud of the city. I think people are really helping. In many cases you see that many people give money in order to make a tax deduction; I don't see that as much here. They really love the company, they really demonstrate it by helping.

One of the great things about Los Angeles is that -- even though any time I'm here I have to work -- more than in any other place, I have the feeling always that I'm on vacation, don't ask me why. [Laughs.]

Ritchie: What interested me in coming up here originally was the job that was in front of me, the challenge of that particular job. As you can imagine, having spent almost 30 years living in New York [and as head of the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts], I had an imbalanced view of Los Angeles and New York, which is maybe unfair. The more I went through the process -- the more I spent time thinking about Los Angeles -- the more I realized that it is a city that is going through an enormous change, and in many ways the impacts in the culture are leading that change.

There was a lot about the city that became exciting to me. I don't understand the city at all, and I don't think I ever will. But I have become interested in it, being part of the cultural scene and being part of this conversation, the dialogue.

Borda: I was running the oldest musical organization in the world [the New York Philharmonic], and there were three things that really attracted me to Los Angeles -- a surprise for me. The critical mass for me was: possibility, people and places.

The possibility goes back to when I was 8 years old and I was given the most magnificent birthday gift -- I was taken to Disneyland. It's every child's dream. I remember I got here from New York, and it was intoxicating. I had never seen a palm tree! There was just this sense of everything is possible: Whatever you dreamed of was possible. That's not true of every place.

In terms of people, it was actually two people who convinced me: Esa-Pekka Salonen and Frank Gehry.

And all the possibilities: I thought of the possibilities -- if we got Disney Concert Hall, and if we used it to really reinvent not just the Los Angeles Philharmonic but the entire concept of what an orchestra of the 21st century can do, what an orchestra of the 21st century can be.

Q: Los Angeles, like so many large metropolises, is becoming a city of growing income and cultural disparities. How are you as institutions addressing this dual reality of a city in which there are very wealthy people who consume culture, along with a huge, growing class of people who've never set foot in any of your institutions?

Borda: One of the issues that we all deal with is the balancing act between being an artistic institution and a social service institution. If we don't protect the values of excellence and innovation, we will take our institutions down.

We spend a lot of time thinking about this. We cannot provide music education in every single school -- we'd love to, but that's probably not the best use of what we do. It came to us that we could be conveners, if we could take full advantage of where we now sit in the city in terms of a great musical organization, a great orchestra, the Hollywood Bowl, all the things that we do. If we could use that to bring together the many different fabrics of the community and play that role of a convener, that would be the best way that we could use the power and the excellence of this institution.

We made a very determined statement in the selection of our new music director, who, at the time I think, had just turned 26. Someone who speaks Spanish. Some 51% of the people in L.A. speak Spanish.

So how can you leverage this? You can't put a museum or an art education program in every single school. You can bring people into the museum, but you've got to do more than that.

U

Changing the relationship with an evolving city

Q: Does anybody have ideas?

Wood: One of the most gratifying experiences I had was the first week I came out to the Getty Center on the weekend. Frankly, I was shocked in the most positive way by the diversity of the audience.

The challenge for us is to get people to feel welcome and to help them physically get to the hill -- because unless you come to those two campuses, you will never experience the incredible product that's at the core of what we make available. The nice thing about having a little more money than I had before is we provide buses to Title 1 schools. It's the most practical, mundane way to get kids there, and it's probably one of the best things we do.

We tried to change school curriculum. Frankly, it was a noble experiment that, at the end of the day, just didn't prove productive enough. But my first inclination is, yes, we should go out. But we are where we are, and where we are is extraordinary. Bring people to us. People want the experience, they just want to feel at ease coming to it.

Domingo: I think that one of the most important things we have in the opera is the education program. Thousands of children get the possibility to do something directly, first with music, then even the possibility to write their own music and then, you know, make operatic themes. I don't know why music is not mandatory in schools. I mean you only have to do it maybe once a week. Every child would learn the principal things from the symphonies and the artists, without even knowing that they were learning music, classical music.

We have such a disadvantage today, with the pop music available for every kid. The parents, probably, they are listening to that music at home. And they go to the iPod and whatever they have available and they have pop music. They have a class at school and they are singing pop music. For us, it's a big battle.

I think, of course, the media is more interested, with simulcasts coming from many of the opera houses or the symphony halls. It's absolutely extraordinary that so many people are paying $18 to see a live opera, in a cinema. The generations are younger. Of course, many of our public is in the 60s and in their 70s, some are in the 80s. But fortunately they feel the spirit and the strength to come out and go to see the opera. But we have more of the generation in their 30s and 40s, which is very good.

Wood: That's a metaphor, I think for L.A., that you start with youth and you go backward. In a young city, you start with contemporary art and you go against the chronology and hopefully eventually you find a Rembrandt up on the hill. Most places I've worked before tended to start chronologically with art history and came to the present era. It's the reverse here.

Govan: The nice thing about the Broad Museum is that contemporary art is right at the entrance. I think it's interesting to think about how the different arts can work together, because performing arts, in general, have a linear relationship to the multicultural experience. The cool thing about museums, for me, was that it was all at one time: Anybody in L.A., anybody from any walk of life, any background, can come to an encyclopedic museum and they can find something of their culture and something of a contrast with another.

So if you could imagine an encyclopedic museum starting in the present, with all cultures, in the center of L.A. -- and now we have a 20-acre park. You had to totally redistribute the fortress that had been put up previously; the wall of the old museum was like "don't go there." Hopefully, you can make an invitation that is fun. And family friendly, because culture, I think, is digested here more by families than in other cities. People talk about transportation and they say, "Oh, no one can get here. That's why the attendance is so low." And I say, "How come, like, 13 million people a year go to the Grove, the shopping mall two blocks away?" So it cannot be transportation. That can't be the issue, there has to be another issue. Maybe you have to restructure the experience in a different way.

We spend a million and a half dollars a year in city schools. We also bring a quarter-million kids into the museum every year. And one of my board members said, "Well, could you bring a million?" I thought about it and said, "Well, I don't know. That would be kind of like putting a man on the moon -- you would have to restructure your parking and support systems, and maybe your facilities, but I suppose you can make that a goal."

Who doesn't scream about the fact that arts aren't in schools? It's incredibly aggravating. I wonder, as a modest proposal, since L.A. is supposed to be able to do anything, why couldn't we reverse it and make L.A. form curriculum around arts? We could.

Borda: In each of our organizations, we all spend millions, but it's not enough. And what I was actually thinking about before was: Is there some way we could work collectively to do that?

I was just really fascinated by Jim's analogy of working backward and forward in time. When I meet with people who run the other major orchestras in the United States, they ask, "How do you get people to come? You do so much contemporary music." We're running 94% of attendance in the winter and over a million people in the summer at the Bowl. But it is a younger audience -- and I think we sort of worked back the other way as well.

Wood: It's been my perspective from the beginning: It's not that the Getty should be more contemporary, we need to be plugged into this contemporary culture. But it seems to me that if L.A. is going to have a really dynamic, profound, contemporary culture, it has to be grounded in a historical perspective. Otherwise, it's empty. And that's what we don't want to be. There's plenty of that, and I'm fascinated by how you can use the entertainment industry. We haven't been smart enough to figure it out yet.

U

Hollywood -- and its money -- isn't important

Q: It's been a pipe dream in this city forever to bring in Hollywood. There was always this idea that if you can get to Hollywood people, you would have this cash flow to support the arts. What is each of you doing to bring Hollywood more into the local arts picture beyond asking a Hollywood director to direct an opera or casting a star in a role at the Ahmanson.

Ritchie: That presumes that Hollywood is an entity that can be grasped.

Q: Presume then.

Ritchie: I can't, because it's not. It's putting the onus on a name that isn't even correct. I mean, Hollywood is a town, itself, and the industry is not even localized in that town -- it's so spread out. And there are many individuals or corporate entities that are part of the larger entertainment industry that I think do take part in what we're doing.

Wood: Defining Hollywood as some other thing you have to tap is a tar baby.

Ritchie: I don't see them as a savior.

Borda: Because they're undergoing the same kind of redefinition. Many of our institutions have dared to reimagine themselves, to reinvent themselves. They're suffering through this now.

Q: Well, frankly, all the power and the money is being transferred over to Google, more than all the studios combined. The question is tapping into that money, and that kind of power. Has the game changed?

Domingo: I think everybody is busy and worried at the same time. You would think that with such a great Hollywood community, the amount of important people in the city -- actors, actresses, directors, producers -- but everybody who is anybody is busy, constantly. It's so difficult to count on people. If you want to invite a certain amount of personalities, no one can give you an answer until maybe two days before the event. You never know when they are going to be in town, when they are not going to be in town.

So I try to say to them, "You know how important arts and culture is for your family. Maybe it's very rare you can go to the opera, but you have to have a full subscription, because your children, your in-laws, anybody in your family needs to have culture in the city." I mean, if every one of them would have subscriptions to the Philharmonic, for the Ahmanson, to go to the museums, to go to the opera, it is a tremendous contribution.

Ritchie: In a museum, you have goals over time. Our goals are set every day, and they are concrete. The seats are there, and you are attempting to fill them.

Beyond that, we start talking about the social services contract we have as nonprofits and as arts institutions that's been imposed upon us, because the government, particularly in the school system, has given up its responsibility to bring culture to the community. So it's falling upon us completely, whereas we used to be partners in bringing culture to the community. We now are not just the leaders, we're the only ones. The burden has been put on institutions to teach as well as to create the art form.

Q: What's the role of transportation when you are talking about serving the greater community?

Domingo: When people want to go to places, they will go. It is very sad that every performance has to start in the rush hour. So it's hard for people. I really feel a lot of admiration for people who have been working all day, and then they have to start driving at 5:30, and they hardly make it at 8 o'clock to come here to the Philharmonic or to the opera, to the arts. I think this is amazing. This is one of the problems we have downtown, that would be fantastic to have transportation.

Borda: Yes, the subway, the subway.

Govan: The subway.

Q: A quick observation, obviously generalizing, but with your predecessors Hollywood was more sought after, it was more significant. Everyone here is sort of saying, "We've got our own deal going."

Govan: I've been here almost two years, and I have had no issues with access to anyone in the industry. The industry, the crossover now. Video games are part of Hollywood, part of entertainment.

Q: Does that cross over into support?

Govan: Absolutely. Everything. Across the board. Any level you want, from attendance to events, to rebuilding the board. So you talk to people like Terry Semel. Or there's also hybrid ones like Christopher DeWolfe, who's a young guy who's dealing with MySpace, but they are so plugged into the industry. We have the head of Activision video games, and they are all making major contributions. Actors are like artists of any kind, you can't count on a schedule for a visual artist, a performing artist or an actor or an actress.

Borda: I have to say that within the visual arts it's fortunate because there's more of a tradition for that. Frankly, there's a theme of collecting that runs underneath it, so they can acquire and invest. Whereas as the completely abstract output of a symphony concert, or opera, it's different.

Govan: But they're not collectors, most of these people are not collectors. They are about the family-public purpose of the cultural institution.

U

How do you serve a global community?

Q: The arts in America have been torn, between creative ambition and the commercial imperative to be profitable. How are you attempting to balance those two claims?

Ritchie: I don't define our decisions by one moment or one theater or one season. From the time I came here, one of the exciting things to me was that we had this broad canvas of three theaters. At any given time, we will never be all things to all people, nor should we seek that. It would diminish the best that we can do. So when questions like that come up, I say, "Time will tell." When I look at our seasons, and the questions come up -- "Are you representing community? Are you representing the art? Are you representing the audience?" -- I look at it and say, "Well, look at our seasons." From the time that I've been here, this theater has produced more world premieres than any other theater in the country [and] generating new work, not just developing, but producing and presenting. When you talk about a diversity, representing community, this theater has produced more diverse productions than any other theater in the country, in the time that I've been here. So we've fulfilled that responsibility to our community.

When you talk about education outreach programs, we reach 30,000 students a year. For us, we're saying, "We've got to start learning some names." We want a real contact. So yes, we serve 30,000, but are there 250 kids that we could serve across their entire education, career and really transform their life? Not just introduce them to the art but create artists themselves.

It goes beyond looking at an individual production or an exhibition and then a score card that you have to fulfill. Time will tell for all of us if what we are doing is good and right.

Q: What would you say serving the community means in sort of a globalized world -- especially in L.A. where the local is the global?

Ritchie: My feeling is this: that the rising tide floats all boats. The stronger the theater community is here in Los Angeles, the better it is for me. It's not a competition.

Wood: The first responsibility is excellence. And then the next thing -- which I find fascinating, and I'm very optimistic that it can work in L.A. -- is that we can all look over our shoulders to make sure what we're doing to achieve that excellence has a logical relationship to what's going on elsewhere. So we don't reproduce each other. I'm fascinated by the totality of L.A.'s cultural package. It's a grid, it's not a target. It has a lot more moving parts than any place that I have ever been.

Borda: When we make a decision here, there are two factors we weigh: excellence and innovation. And it is this global sense now. I mean, the kind of artists that we are all presenting don't belong to any one country. They might have been born in China, but now they live in L.A. or they move to Chicago, or they live in Vienna.

Wood: Your advantage as a performance institution is that you can bring in any performance from around the globe. I've got a collecting policy that is very narrow. I think of the Villa as a center for comparative archaeology. So in the next couple of years, we intend to bring a great exhibition of Mexican antiquities, which we'll show in relationship to Mediterranean culture. And we'd like to bring Cambodian bronzes, a great tradition of bronze casting from antiquity, in the context with classical Mediterranean arts. So there are many ways to get global, given our individual strengths and limitations.

Q: L.A. now is an international city, we all agree. How does the fact that we are trying to build a cultural destination in L.A. affect what you program or how you market your institutions?

Domingo: To serve the city, the state, I believe that we have to get together to establish something that will help the tourism -- we should initiate a festival. It could be a month or two weeks, three weeks maybe [with] special exhibitions, whatever could be done, with the Philharmonic, with the opera, and also, because time is a challenge, we could include a tournament of golf, or for the children to go to Disneyland. I believe Los Angeles should have a festival, which we should all do together.

Borda: I think with Gustavo coming, we are going to have a lot of opportunities. I think that Gustavo coming to L.A. is as big as the opening of the Walt Disney Concert Hall. That seems like a shocking thing to say, but I think that it is true.

U

Unlike other cities, L.A. is just learning how to give

Q: Michael, you mentioned earlier the idea of a noncompetitive situation: Do you feel a competitive nature with other arts groups? Dollars, money, audience?

Ritchie: I don't know if it would be true if I were in New York, say, where there are so many other theaters that were fighting for the same audience -- in terms of the numbers and the dollars. What I would say out here is that this is a very philanthropic city. I think they give because they support the idea of arts and culture. It's not necessarily about the tax write-off, so I don't find the competition among the institutions here.

Wood: The Getty is obviously a bit of an anomaly here. We're not competing for money. We would compete for gifts of works of art, but we haven't been very good at it so far. [Laughter.] I'm really excited about the possibility of a cooperation. I mean, New York can talk about it, but basically they turn their back on it. Our niches are very different here. It adds up to a total, but the parts are quite different.

The Getty is a great driver for cultural tourism, it staggers me -- 50% of our attendance [comes from outside L.A.]. And those people go on to other places. So we're a good portal for that. I don't think we're the competition, quite the opposite. I need more families, and people locally.

Domingo: You know, many of our donors, they give to everyone. You know, the only thing is when you hear someone gives $50 million to someone. You [say], "Why is it not coming to us?"

[Laughter.]

Govan: It depends on what comes with it, though . . .

[Laughter.]

Borda: Because people do have specific interests, they sometimes give to many of these groups, or sometimes it's because they like one art form or another. You know, when you had your opening, I was so proud of the opening of the new institution, what it meant for our city. We have a great relationship with the opera,and the better they do, the better we do. And I think in that sense it's a very different thing here. You know, I worked at Lincoln Center for 10 years, and I can tell you that it's very different.

Govan: I 100% agree that the general feeling is that it is very easy to work together as institutions, and there's a lot in common and a lot of encouragement. I frankly think that is one of L.A.'s strengths. And we can continue to play on that -- whether it's a festival or working together on education initiatives.

I think the other thing is that it's a very philanthropic community that gives for the right reasons. However, there's a long way to go.

Wood: More civic commitment. There's not a civic initiative.

Govan: The big issue is that the pie can get a lot bigger, we're still underperforming as a city, in terms of dollars -- private dollars into public arts. We have a long way to go -- and we can do it because we're one of the most powerful, wealthy cities in the world.

Wood: I guarantee you, Chicago is giving more per capita than L.A.

Borda: It's developing.

Govan: The pot can get bigger, but the whole thing is education: We all need to be inspiring and educating that community. Then we can raise the bar. The giving levels are low, compared to other big cities. I realized that about the museum, that in museums, in the visual arts, other than the Getty -- the Hammer, MOCA -- giving levels are low. And I think part of that is that they have to raise the ceiling. One of the things we've done is going on a campaign together -- we're all in this together -- to raise the barThat will help every little institution, that's the way it is anywhere: You're riding on the coattails of the large institutions.

Borda: The philanthropy here is in a much less developed spot.

Govan: There's opportunity. I think there's a lot of people here who haven't had the thrill of what it means to participate in cultural institutions. Most of us would say that the people who participate and give money love it. It's a big part of the satisfaction of their lives. I've seen people now making major contributions to the museum, who up to very recently never [visited the museum].

Domingo: One of the most worrying things to know is how much you have to raise. The satisfaction to know that, yes, you've raised that money. But the moment you raise that money, it's gone. And so someone comes and says, "Here, you have this extra $5 million, let's see what you can do with that." And I say, "We already spent it." [Laughter.]

Borda: It's amazing, that sense of vista here, that sense of possibility

Govan: It's so exciting to know that there are so many people here. I did not feel that in New York. I generally felt that anyone who was a potential supporter was more or less identified, self-identified, identified by friends, part of a network, and then it was mining the network. Here, it's completely open.

Q: Do you see particular communities, whether it's geographical or other communities, that you feel are untapped here, or not tapped enough?

Govan: All of them.

Wood: I think it's a great source of identity.

Govan: I think there's a huge, huge growth potential. I think that curve, I'm not sure has an end.

Ritchie: But I think it's part of the maturity of the city. This conversation isn't happening in New York right now, the New York Times is not bringing together arts leaders to say, "Where does culture fit into this city?" It's not a question; it has been long determined there, whereas it is being determined here.

And so it goes back to "Why did you come here?," the first question we were asked. Because something is happening here, and everybody is discovering it together at the same time. And that's part of the excitement -- of what's going on here. Not only of what's being created, but the support that's coming behind it and how it is beginning to identify this city. It is at the highest level of arts and culture, it's just coming to its maturity, and it's starting to stake its place, it's starting to plant its feet, and saying: "We're here."

I think that's why a lot of us were intrigued by moving to Los Angeles and, as we were going through the thought process, became more and more excited. [To Wood] For you to say that you can't imagine being anywhere else at this point of your life is a major statement.

Q: How do institutions here get people to come to the Getty and elsewhere when they come here to visit Disneyland or Sea World?

Wood: The Getty is a very interesting destination. People shouldn't talk about the "Bilbao Effect," they should talk about the "Getty Effect." It's remarkable -- its site, architecture, extraordinary gardens and remarkable collections. But what motivates most people to come visit? Most probably don't start with the collection, fine as it is. It varies for different groups. In some ways, the further you get from L.A., the more you want to see it in its totality. I'm not sure it's reproducible.

Q: But how do you work together to help more people coming to the Getty also see a play or go to the opera?

Wood: I think it's awareness. And newspapers do help with that. Part of it is awareness, targeting. People come for one [thing but], are there really other things they can do? If you are really determined to make the Met in New York, you book a hotel on the Upper East Side, you spend three days, and you go to the Met, you know, three different days. Here, book a hotel anywhere, get a fast car and you'll see the wings of the Met, but it's going to be in a 30-mile radius. It's just a different mind-set. Which is a little foreign, particularly to New Yorkers, but it's quite doable.

Govan: Yeah, there might also be possibilities, I mean, Plácido, your idea about a festival, whether we could do it once a year, I don't know. But I think we could potentially collaborate in a more concrete way, either by some thematic coherence and a little bump up in energy at a particular time and develop a calendar rhythm that could just focus a little more attention. We're all skeptical sometimes of festivals because of what they cause in terms of all the extra work and having to work around them. But it is possible that we could do something.

Domingo: The "Ring Cycle" maybe could be the time.

Borda: The issue is we need to plan for that, because our institutions need to plan. But this is very good. Maybe this will be the excuse that brings us together

Q: How often do the arts leaders in Los Angeles get together? Do you ever get together?

Ritchie: How long did it take you to get us all here? It took 40 e-mails . . .

Q: So who do you see taking the leadership on something like a festival? Is it Plácido and the opera? Is it the city? Is it the mayor? Who would be responsible?

Domingo: I think we all have to decide to do something important, and that in any case, we'll always have important programming. If we can make a good package with everything, we can have a lot of publicity and many people participating.

Borda: If this group is united in trying to do something like this, then the county and city should do this. We have departments of tourism, and I really don't know what they are focused on, except getting people to Disneyland. I think we'd need to form partnerships to be able to do this. I was thinking it would be great for this group to meet on a regular basis.

Govan: The interesting thing is that, strategically, you couldn't do this in New York. All the big institutions -- the opera, obviously the museums -- none of them could ever collaborate on a big event like that because they are all too big. We actually could cross the communities, and if you actually crossed the communities here, it would probably be the most prestigious and interesting group in the world. One event, or something like that, every two years, to kick off the festival. It would be the most prestigious, influential group from theater to whatever.

U

Leadership opportunities on education initiatives

Q: Besides a big event like that, a really large-scale collaboration, are there any other things that you could envision?

Borda: I think this group is very artistically independent. I think it's how we leverage the intellect, and how our institutions do really effect a different goal for the city, a different place. I think that's the power of the group.

Wood: I think one of the great challenges in the visual arts community is that the collections are not in totality, are not being made the most of. Maybe that's because you have more institutions, different pieces, different visibility, different needs to make the most of their own collections. And that through cooperation and creativity, I think there are some real opportunities.

Govan: The education thing is pretty interesting to me. I find among my donor base, most of them have as their chief priority: education. I didn't find that, in New York. But the issue of education, and public education and kids' education here is so huge and close to everyone's heart. I wonder if we could leverage that somehow.

Why couldn't we? Every piece of data shows arts in early education through high school has a hugely influential role in retention of students, the creative arts and even test scores. But no one is willing to try it, right? Among us we actually have a huge amount of influence. People who are our base are hugely influential. If we decided that we ought to press the agenda of an arts-based education -- since nothing else is working -- I wonder if it wouldn't go somewhere right now. Is that crazy?

Wood: Maybe you start with charter schools. There's an amazing charter movement in this city. Huge numbers. But they aren't necessarily in the wealthy areas or even doing that much better, but they might be much more open. I'm really nervous about tackling the education bureaucracy.

Borda: We actually just went through this. And I have found it is very, very discouraging dealing with the large bureaucracies. But maybe this group could do it.

Govan: But the calls are already being made to the people who are making decisions. All the time. It's sort of eerie how close you feel in L.A. to the actual decisions being made in those bureaucracies.

Just for the hell of it, we did this project that we took over Charles White Elementary School by MacArthur Park, that has an art gallery. I said, "We're going to take some art and actually open the collection." We brought some ancient art and Modern art and kids art, and we made an art museum in MacArthur Park. And it was fantastically successful, and the kids took pride in it. And I was thinking, "L.A. could have that image, right?" We could try. The bureaucracy isn't that big here. It isn't as big as New York.

Borda: I think we all have to be involved. I think there are ways to get it done.

Govan: As a private venture? I don't know. It is the city of the future, right? That's our tagline: city of the future. Every one of us has talked about the kids and our role, how to educate. We also talked about America's general problem, vis-à-vis Europe. That is, culture is part of daily life in Europe in a way that it isn't here, and maybe we could establish that new place. I don't know, is that crazy?

Borda: No, I think it's worth talking about.

Ritchie: Absolutely.

Govan: And we have leaders. Gustavo. And [to Domingo] you're an amazing spokesperson. I mean, I think between people like that, who can speak, and use media. . . .

Borda: You know, they did a show on Gustavo on the TV show "60 Minutes." I was in Berlin, and the next morning I got up and had close to 80 messages from around the world, including Los Angeles. And we could leverage people like Gustavo and Plácido.

Govan: Yeah, I think the two of you alone, with a campaign and us behind you, using media and taking advantage of our friends in the media. If we wanted to get something done, why couldn't we get something done?

Domingo: That's just like what I was telling you before about education: There are so many times our donors won't give money to the opera. But if you mention education, "Whatever you need."

Borda: Money for turning on our lights, forget about it. Money for education, OK.

Govan: I know. If one more person says, "I wanna do something. I'll give, but I want it to be unique -- I want it to go to education."

[Laughter.]

But we all know that we are educational institutions. It's not that we have educational programs, we are education.

Wood: We've just redone our mission statement. It's short, but: "further knowledge and nourish critical seeing." It is an essential attempt on our part to focus all of these different things we do from conservation to research, to collecting, to presentation, and it comes down to an individual work of art. I've been trying to move our mission statement a little away from the umbrella of education, toward a more specific type of education, that includes seeing -- and we like the words "critical seeing."

Govan: There is this misconception that education is this program "in addition."

Borda: It is interesting that it's seen as this sort of "add on" to the side. We had a separate education department, and one of the first things I did was take the education department and integrate it into the artistic department. Education is not just about young people, but it's about your audience, the audience itself.

Ritchie: We did the same thing. It's adult education in a certain way.

Q: Since you are all from other places, at various times, what you are finding, in terms of programming?Do you present differently in Los Angeles? What works in L.A. that wouldn't work in New York? Do you find that you program for the city itself?

Borda: We take what we believe in and we do it. Then we take it to New York and then go, "Wow." Like our "Tristan Project" -- that was completely an L.A. project with L.A.-based artists.

U

How to define an 'L.A. audience'

Q: Michael, do you think the audience here is different in any way?

Ritchie: If you are talking about the pure theater audience here, they've had world-class theater for at least 40 years. But this audience is sophisticated. Plus, this audience, in terms of a theater-going audience, is also an audience that travels a lot. I am consistently surprised by how much arts and culture this community gets outside of Los Angeles. They travel specifically for it. I can't tell you the number of audience members that come up to me and say, "Hey, have you seen X?" So, no, I don't think we program for this audience. I think that if it becomes a check list, that's wrong. You produce stuff that's the highest level in quality and you presume that it's world class, so that it belongs here.

Wood: An advantage in the visual arts might be -- I mean, I can't take credit for this because this was organized before I arrived -- was the icons from the Sinai. Qualitatively excellent, wonderful. The Getty was one of the few institutions that probably could have done it because it required lots of conservation work. But then it turns out that there was a huge Orthodox community that looked at that show in a very different way. There is a built-in community in Los Angeles.

Govan: That's true, although I have to say, I've sensed from your programs more confidence about generating a local perspective. And if you look in the history of the L.A. County Museum, it's a perfect example. For many, many years, L.A. County Museum just tried to be a smaller version of what East Coast museums were. I think that there's growing confidence in all of our institutions -- you just think about the number of world premieres. Twenty years ago, L.A.'s cultural institutions were quite conservative in that they were trying to take things that were elsewhere -- things that were already verified elsewhere. And now there is a great interest in just being able to do things that originate here and have this adventurous spirit, which comes with confidence.

Borda: Do you ever worry sometimes that there's too much time spent comparing ourselves to the East Coast, and that sort of bothers me.

Govan: We're doing it less and less and less.

Ritchie: And comparing more favorably.

Govan: We're doing our own thing, out of our own material, our own drive.

Ritchie: And we're not trying to make a Music Center that looks like Lincoln Center.

Domingo: I believe that maybe that attraction of Los Angeles is that it is a young city culturally, unlike New York or Chicago. The people are so enthusiastic, and they really are ready for everything so you can be more daring. You can dare a lot more when you plan your programs. Sometimes people, if you put on a traditional opera and something that isn't so well known but is very well cast and is a very exciting production, they will come easier to that. So according to your timing, you are not thinking what is happening in New York. You don't even think what is happening in San Francisco.

Govan: I don't think anyone does that anymore.

Domingo: Los Angeles is a special city. I think that we can dare. To commission nine world premieres, of course, you always have the advantage that they can still be part of a program and in that program you will combine other things. It is more dangerous in the operatic world that if we're going to do a world premiere, it's the whole evening.

Borda: But you take our Concrete Frequency festival, that we had -- that was hard-core contemporary listening. Or take Minimalist Jukebox. These are programs that worked very well together. People came to them.

Q: How do you get your message out there?

Govan: I tend to find the support groups very media-savvy because they are involved in, obviously, the Information Age and the Internet community and all of that. They understand multiple means of distribution. There's also a great awareness in Los Angeles, for obvious reasons, of production value.

Domingo: One of the big problems of having really one important newspaper in the city is that, for instance, if you are in London doing a production, you have six, seven, eight newspapers that are all interested, so you can have a lot of promotion going on, you can have a lot of interviews going on. So logically, the Los Angeles Times has so many things to cover, to get the amount of promotion and publicity that you want to give to something is very difficult.

Borda: But it's about taking time to rethink how we reach our audiences. So, for example, we just recently added podcasting to our website. Traffic is a problem, so now there's a way, if you are driving and you are not going to get here in time to hear the Upbeat Live lecture we do before the concert, you can listen to it in your car. In the old days it was the newspaper and the classical music stations, but it's just not that anymore.

[Vangelist]

Here's the accompanying Times article to that piece. I like Govan - and speaking of a "young city" and all that, his own youthfulness relative to his predecessor certainly informs his enthusiasm

Dweebo - great post! - long time no see. I remember you from SSC, and had no idea you were an architect

Cultural leaders confident of arts' role in L.A.


The heads of five prominent institutions look to the future, stressing education, community and collaboration.
By Reed Johnson, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
March 23, 2008
They're all outsiders, drawn to Los Angeles from such established creative hubs as New York and Chicago by the potential of a city they see as still defining itself culturally.

They speak with confidence about the role that the arts can play in Los Angeles, and declare their willingness to work together to expand arts education and possibly sponsor a major citywide cultural initiative, such as an arts festival.

Related Stories
- Five leaders of cultural L.A. weigh the city's past, progress and its potential

They're the leaders of Los Angeles' five most prominent cultural institutions: Deborah Borda, president and chief executive of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Assn.; Placido Domingo, general director of Los Angeles Opera; Michael Govan, director and chief executive of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Michael Ritchie, artistic director of Center Theatre Group, which includes the Ahmanson Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum and the Kirk Douglas Theatre; and James N. Wood, president and chief executive of the Getty Trust.

The Times brought the five together for the first time March 2 for a wide-ranging roundtable discussion. They exchanged impressions of their adopted city, analyzed Los Angeles' emerging status as an acknowledged global center of contemporary art production, detailed challenges facing their institutions and laid out a collective vision of how the arts could play a greater regional role in the century ahead.

To begin with, most said they had been attracted to Los Angeles because its cultural identity is less formalized than those of other cities.

"L.A. has emerged very recently as one of the major centers of art production -- and it's on the rise," said Govan, former director of the Dia Art Foundation in New York City who came to Los Angeles about two years ago.

Ritchie, who ran the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts before taking over at Center Theatre Group in January 2005, agreed that the arts in Los Angeles are gaining worldwide attention. "Something is happening here, and everybody is discovering it together," he said.

A recurring question raised by the five arts leaders was how their institutions could attract individuals and groups that have traditionally had limited or no access to them.

There was a consensus that educational programming, directed at both children and adults, is key to any such community outreach effort. But there are obstacles and limits to what education alone can achieve, the leaders agreed.

Govan suggested that he and the others "ought to press the agenda of an arts-based education." Wood said that such an effort might start with the city's charter schools but that he was "really nervous about tackling the education bureaucracy."

Calling the institutions' education programs "one of the most important things we have," Domingo lamented that music instruction isn't mandatory in public schools. "We have such a disadvantage today, with the pop music available for every kid," he said.

Borda, who took the reins of the L.A. Philharmonic in 2000 after leading the New York Philharmonic, emphasized that providing arts education "in every single school" is "probably not the best use of what we do" in terms of developing new constituencies.

Rather, she said, the orchestra and other large cultural organizations can serve as "conveners" that leverage their resources to "bring together the many different fabrics of the community."

She underscored the Philharmonic's naming of new music director Gustavo Dudamel, a 27-year-old Spanish-speaking Venezuelan, as "a very determined statement" of the orchestra's commitment to serving Southern California's growing Latino population.

Inevitably the discussion turned toward the giant pop-culture force that has long overshadowed the arts in Los Angeles: Hollywood. For decades among L.A. cultural leaders, Hollywood was regarded with a mixture of envy and wishful thinking. Efforts to solicit Hollywood financial support and integrate Hollywood artists into the city's high-culture scene often produced mixed results.

But according to the five panelists, that old scenario no longer applies.

While Hollywood is too sprawling an entity to be grasped or generalized about, Ritchie said, "there are many individuals or corporate entities that are part of the larger entertainment industry that I think do take part in what we're doing."

However, the group agreed that Los Angeles still lags behind other metropolises in private arts philanthropy. "I guarantee you, Chicago is giving more per capita than L.A.," Wood said.

The question of what it means to program "locally" in a city as cosmopolitan and globalized as Los Angeles has become increasingly complex, the leaders agreed.

Wood, former president of the Art Institute of Chicago, said the Getty is responding to this reality by addressing some of L.A.'s "built-in communities" with a show on Sinai icons and upcoming exhibitions of Mexican antiquities and Cambodian bronzes.

Govan suggested that cultural institutions such as LACMA have become more daringly international and adventurous by embracing rather than downplaying their local identity.

"Twenty years ago, L.A.'s cultural institutions were quite conservative," he said. LACMA's original buildings were "anonymous," Govan added, and the museum is now "making a conscious effort" to recognize its L.A. identity by adding artistic touches like Robert Irwin's palm trees and Chris Burden's street lamp installation.

Who will take the role of arts leadership in the decades to come? The panelists acknowledged the challenges in trying to collaborate or even meet regularly with other local arts entities. As Ritchie pointed out, "it took 40 e-mails" just to arrange this discussion.

Toward the end of the meeting, these various strands of thought coalesced around the idea of an arts festival, proposed by Domingo. He suggested a two-week or monthlong event, possibly connected to L.A. Opera's production of Wagner's "Ring" cycle in 2010, with "special exhibitions, whatever could be done, with the Philharmonic, with the opera," as well as family-oriented recreational activities.

The idea was well received.

"The issue is, we need to plan for that," Borda said. "But this is very good. Maybe this will be the excuse that brings us together."

reed.johnson@latimes.com

[Vangelist]

Annoying that it isn't playing here yet but I think this should be mandatory viewing for all contributors to this thread. Maybe a forum meet-up to go see this when it arrives?

http://www.metacritic.com/film/titles/coolschool

The Cool School is the story of American art in the 1950s and '60s, LA's coming of age, and a distinctive, fraternal group of headstrong talents. The renowned Ferus Art Gallery groomed certain members of the LA art scene from a loose band of idealistic beatniks into a coterie of competitive, often-brilliant artists. What was lost and gained is tied up in complex web of egos, passions, money, and art. The Cool School is about San Francisco versus LA, New York versus LA, commercialism, and bohemianism. Ferus managed to do for art in LA what the museums would not; the gallery gave birth to a vibrant, coalescing scene. Assemblage art, abstract expressionism, or Pop--the men of Ferus shared ideas, goals, studios, women, and a vision. The Cool School is an extraordinary lesson in how a city can build an art scene from scratch without losing its soul. (Tremolo Productions)


http://imdb.com/title/tt1031225/

How LA Learned to Love Modern Art. A lesson in how a few renegade artists built an art scene from scratch.

[Vangelist]

The Hollywood Reporter:
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/imdb/reviews/article_display.jsp?rid=9490&vnu_special_account_code=thrsiteimdbpro

The Cool School

Bottom Line: A spirited riposte to the groundless cliche that Los Angeles is a cultural wasteland.

By Sheri Linden
Jul 12, 2007

Arthouse Films

Documentarian Morgan Neville has fashioned a spirited riposte to the groundless cliche that Los Angeles is a cultural wasteland.

Rather than delve into individual backgrounds, "The Cool School" uses a wealth of archival material and up-to-date interviews to paint a group portrait of the artists, curators and collectors who built an influential gallery scene in Beat-era Los Angeles. Narrator Jeff Bridges lends the smart script -- by Neville and journalist Kristine McKenna -- the perfect Southern California intellectual hipster tone. Jazz tracks propel the playful visual mix of black and white and color.

A selection of the recent Los Angeles Film Festival, the film is scheduled for a fall theatrical run before screening on PBS' "Independent Lens" in 2008. Its chief appeal is to aficionados, but viewers with even a cursory knowledge of modern art will find plenty to enjoy in the lessons of "Cool School."

In the face of East Coast chauvinism and local red-scare censorship, Los Angeles' Ferus gallery became an art-world destination soon after opening its doors March 15, 1957. It was not in Manhattan but at Ferus' La Cienega Boulevard site that Andy Warhol's first gallery show went up. Helmed by the unlikely partnership of Walter Hopps, a biochemistry major with a passion for abstract expressionism, and Ed Kienholz, whose groundbreaking assemblages would make him a world-renowned artist, Ferus became a crucial hub in the city's emerging avant-garde scene. Self-promoting theatrics abounded, but beneath those was an ambitious and serious sense of experimentation.

This was a time, of course, when Venice rentals were cheap and "poetic poverty," as one participant puts it, was possible. Barney's Beanery served as de facto clubhouse for the bohemian set, which shared the bar with Bekins employees. But it wasn't all easy street; Wallace Berman's Ferus show was closed by the vice squad for obscenity, the artist carted off to jail. In its brief nine years, Ferus faced its fair share of struggle, but "Cool School" presents a convincing case for its revivifying effect on the region's museums.

Neville doesn't avoid dismissive naysayers, but it's those speaking from the inside who give the film its intimate edge. Besides many of the artists, those interviewed include Ferus owner Hopps; his second partner, the more commerce-oriented Irving Blum; and Shirley Nielsen, who ended up marrying both of them. Artists and scenesters Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell puff on cigars as they reminisce; Frank Gehry explains why he gravitated to painters and sculptors rather than fellow architects.


Manhola in the NYT: (i wuv her, she's maybe my fave current working crit)
http://movies.nytimes.com/2008/03/28/movies/28cool.html?ref=movies&pagewanted=print

March 28, 2008
Birth of Los Angeles Art, Assisted by Hip Midwives

By MANOHLA DARGIS
“The Cool School,” a breezy, lively documentary about a thin slice of the Los Angeles fine art scene in the 1950s, is easy on the eyes, and the ears too. The focal point of this historical gloss is the Ferus Gallery, which opened in 1957 and soon became a cultural hub with shows dedicated to local talent like Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin, Ed Moses, Wallace Berman and Ed Kienholz and a then-unknown out-of-towner with a fondness for Campbell’s Soup named Andy Warhol.

Near the northern end of the centrally located boulevard called La Cienega (“the swamp” in Spanish), not far from the Sunset Strip, Ferus was founded by Mr. Kienholz and Walter Hopps, a Los Angeles native who as a teenager had met Marcel Duchamp. The movie’s director, Morgan Neville, tells what followed through an often fascinating, visually charming and intelligently edited mix of found footage, home movies, still images and contemporary interviews, ably assisted by a jazz score and narration from the actor (and photographer) Jeff Bridges. The older footage is particularly delightful, including the sights and sounds of a grinning, goateed Mr. Kienholz bargaining with a junkyard dealer to buy a 1953 Cadillac door that probably ended up in one of his amazing assemblages.

Written by Mr. Neville and Kristine McKenna, who together also produced the movie, “The Cool School” replaces the familiar great-man theory of history for a great-guys one instead. (Despite a few women, including the regal Shirley Nielsen Hopps, who was married first to Walter Hopps and then to another Ferus notable, Irving Blum, most of the faces here are male.) It’s an old story in some ways, a myth-making tale of a group of post-World War II aesthetic adventurers who, working together and alone, created an exciting American moment. Given the lingering prejudice of some East Coasters and the inferiority complex of select West Coasters, though, it’s also a story that deserves to be told often and as loudly as possible.

“The Cool School,” is, well, cool, but it’s also fairly parochial. It’s received wisdom that Los Angeles in the 1950s was a cultural wasteland, or “dust bowl,” as the movie’s publicity material puts it. It’s understandable why artists who came of some kind of age in Los Angeles then would recycle this sort of self-serving nonsense, as if they were the only ones to have made this notional desert bloom, (haha) but it’s disappointing that the filmmakers do the same. By the time Ferus opened its doors, Los Angeles was already a cultural oasis, even if New York — represented in the movie by a hilariously condescending Ivan C. Karp of the OK Harris gallery in SoHo — and too many Angelenos weren’t paying attention.

Part of the problem is the movie’s 86-minute running time, which doesn’t allow for the kind of depth this story deserves and of which the filmmakers are obviously capable. Another issue is its narrow view of how art happens and how histories should be told. Despite periodic sideways glances, the filmmakers overly isolate these painters and sculptors who lived, worked and played in Los Angeles from their historical context, from the overlapping, cross-pollinating worlds of the local surfers, the avant-garde filmmakers, architects, dancers, jazz musicians, hot rodders, bikers, novelists, poets, playwrights, intellectuals and graphic designers who were also doing their own cool thing — some for years, others for decades — not to mention those vulgarians in Hollywood. “The Cool School” offers a tantalizing taste; now for the meal.

THE COOL SCHOOL

Opens on Friday in Manhattan.

Directed by Morgan Neville; narrated by Jeff Bridges; written and produced by Mr. Neville and Kristine McKenna; directors of photography, Dylan Robertson and Mr. Neville; edited by Mr. Robertson and Chris Perkel; music by Dan Crane and William Ungerman; released by Arthouse Films. At Cinema Village, 22 East 12th Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. This film is not rated.

[LosAngelesBeauty]

I wouldn't mind going to see that...When is it playing in LA?

[Vangelist]

I don't know when it's supposed to open here, hopefully sometime in the next couple weeks

[dragonsky]

Music Center Annex to Be Replaced

Building up to 10 Stories to Rise Across From Cathedral

by Rod Riggs

http://images.townnews.com/ladowntownnews.com/content/articles/2008/04/07/news/news05.jpg

Bunker Hill, long a site of dramatic construction projects, is in line for yet another. The Music Center will replace its forlorn Annex building on the northwest corner of Grand Avenue and Temple Street, officials have announced.

The 1950s-era structure housed the County Coroner's office until that activity was moved to the county health center. Various contractors used the building until it was turned over to the Center Theatre Group in 1967 for offices and workspace.

"What had been the morgue became rehearsal space," said Stephen D. Rountree, Music Center president and chief executive.

The Annex project was described by Music Center Chairman John B. Emerson at the annual Shining Stars program honoring volunteers at the performing arts hub. He led up to the disclosure by describing progress of the Music Center's present construction.

The $30 million renovation of the Mark Taper Forum is on budget and on time, he said. The first new production will take place in September.

However, the planned remodel of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion will be put off until 2012 because Los Angeles Opera has contracts for performances until then.

"If there is to be a substantial revision of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, requiring replacement of the offices now in the building, then we need to relocate them," Emerson said.

Present thinking is to tear down the low-slung Annex and replace it with "something more in keeping with the neighborhood," Emerson said. "The area under consideration would be rebuilt into an exciting new building for offices and rehearsal space for use by the Center Theatre Group and the leadership of the Music Center."

The Music Center board is considering a 150,000-square-foot building of six to 10 stories.

"It would be scaled to be an appropriate neighbor to the Cathedral" across the street, Rountree said.

In addition to rehearsal rooms and studios for dance, opera and theater, it would have offices and a new feature, a small "black box" theater - one with simple amenities and flexible design - for educational programs.

"It's very expensive to use the larger theater for such programs," Rountree said.

Fitting Architectural Neighbor

The project would sit near the northern end of a rapidly changing Grand Avenue. Immediately north of the principal Music Center campus, it would face the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels and be within walking distance of the under-construction $232 million High School for the Visual and Performing Arts. It would be less than two blocks from Walt Disney Concert Hall and the coming $3 billion Grand Avenue development.

Although the Music Center board has not employed an architect, Rountree said, "Obviously the building will have to have some architectural character appropriate to a neighborhood that includes the new performing arts high school, the Cathedral, Disney Hall and MOCA."

The County, which operates the Music Center, has "blessed the concept," he added.

"We don't have the money yet, but hope the financial picture will come together by the end of summer. We expect to complete the project by 2012 so we can move the staff and free up the Pavilion for the work to be done there," Rountree said.

Meanwhile, work continues on the Mark Taper Forum, the 1967 cylindrical venue that has hosted many of the Music Center's more adventuresome productions. The 745-seat theater will see expanded restrooms and a lounge on the lower level. It will also allow for a larger lobby.

In the auditorium, theatergoers will find new seating with green upholstery. Sight lines are also being improved.

Backstage dressing rooms have been moved to a lower level. Additional space came from removing a "treadmill" installed at the rear of the building to move scenery, but never used. Revision of the ventilation system provided more overhead space. Wardrobe and props now can be stored on site.

"There is the safety factor of less crowded conditions plus, some artists just did not like the backstage," Rountree said. An unexpected benefit was that a wheelchair ramp added in the 1990s can be made nearly level with the new configuration.

"It will be a dramatic change," Rountree said, even though the exterior of the building has not been altered perceptibly. In fact, Jacques Overhoff, the artist who created the sculpture relief that runs around the top of the edifice, has been located and is expected to observe restoration of areas that have suffered damage over the years.

The renovation of the Taper is expected to be complete by July, and the building will reopen to the public Sept. 14 with the premiere of John Guare's dark comedy The House of Blue Leaves.

The Ahmanson Theatre was remodeled in the mid-1990s, leaving just the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to be brought up to date.

"We need to relocate the staff from the building. They don't need to be sitting next to the stage," Rountree said. "Meanwhile, there is a lot of work we can do without closing the building.

Architects and engineers are analyzing the 45-year-old Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to see what must be done to bring its lighting and sound systems up to date. The renovation may near completion in 2014, Rountree said.

[LosAngelesBeauty]

^ That's really exciting news. I actually wished for this very thing back a few years ago when I used to walk by there. Even when I get on the 101 freeway from that entrance, I used to imagine something substantial there. It would be a great addition to the area since we need as much activity around the bridge to push for the "capping of the freeway" to make way for a park or something akin to Hollywood's plan.

[edluva]

the title of the article, "cool school", is obviously a play on the "Cool" jazz genre that dominated LA's central ave scene in the 60s, though it is ironic becuase in contrary to the title's suggestion that LA became an art "movement" on its own right, the fact is cool never originated in LA.

Cool jazz started in NY, and "West Coast jazz", the subgenre typically credited to the "LA scene" was never a genre that stood on its own right. It always existed as a subgenre of Cool, and it never really sustained commercial mainstream traction.

In fact, I find all this talk about LA's "worldly" high art aspirations tiresome. LA's current creative blitz is a relatively inconsequential blip on the global stage in comparison to NY's abstract expressionism, Parisian impressionism and cubism, German bauhaus and expressionism, or to Chicago's role in redefining the international style, which in-turn became a school in its own right.

LA is very good a repackaging movements already in-play, however. The artistic vanguard of most major movements originate in other cities, whereas LA often sustains such movements well into the mainstream with lighter-weight, commercially successful facsimiles. A good instance, aside from jazz, can be found in punk rock's development here. I have a very difficult time thinking of a single major artistic movement that took rise as a response to LA's uniquely local social-urban tribulations, but have a very easy time thinking about those that merely re-interpret or repackage movements originating in other cities.

These articles are just examples of angeleno history repeating itself - someone announces "LA has arrived" merely because an artistic development in Los Angeles is beginning to resemble one which harkened NY or some other city to acclaim in the past. The painful irony being that "arrival" has in almost every single case, been predefined by the standards of another city in the past. Hell, the very perfection with which BCAM's opening and reception encapsulates this irony, is ironic.

[dweebo2220]

(hey man, we invented car culture. No one can take that away..)

I hope LA doesn't "arrive" too soon here.. everything will get a lot more boring when it does.

I agree that there's a lot of hype flying about, but just because a clueless philanthropist builds a children's museum of contemporary art doesn't discount the fact that LA is one of the great art capitals of the world and has been one for some time. Maybe we can't rest on our laurels like NYC or Paris yet, but one would be silly to deny that we're an art town.

In response to your remark that the recent activity in LA is a "blip" compared to the other movements you listed, I would have to agree. I think it would be foolish to expect art will ever again go through such drastic changes as those of the early 20th century. In the grand scheme of human history, we still pretty much live in the industrial age.. unless there's another similar order of change in the way human culture is structured, I can't see how anything as drastic would occur in the art world.

That said, LA is definitely the most relevant art capital right now.. we do after all live in the "right now."

So I'm glad to be here.

[ocman]

LA's current status isn't due to any movement or artistic development that the city can claim. It's due to a dynamic local arts community and to the significant number of very successful contemporary artists who work here and are being shown internationally. The city's reputation also benefits from the number of high-profile exhibitions produced in recent years by our local institutions.

But if you consider film to be art, then you have a whole medium where the city is unrivaled in variegations concerning content and style. Although instead of having "movements", we have "genres" and film "periods" as film is more content-driven and less reliant on technique to further an artistic goal.

I don't think it's fair to say that Los Angeles pejoratively repackages other cities' movements as if cities could somehow "own" movements. Surely a movement would be taken up nationwide or globally without any actual physical borders of influence. And surely, there's going to be interpretations based on local context. It's easy to think of all the "repackaged" movements of Los Angeles if you believe that modernists and jazz players and impressionists can't exist in cities other than the cities where they originated from. But then it wouldn't be a "movement." And so then why would LA be exceptional in "repackaging" movements?

[dweebo2220]

thanks, OCMAN, I wanted to make a point about how the "repackaging" argument was flawed but was too tired to think.. you said it better than i could have.

I think LA has made important contributions to various movements along the way (modernism quickly comes to mind, and punk as edluva brought up)--to call them "repackaging" both ignores the context that artistic movements exist in and adds a negative connotation that I really just don't see as accurate.

Also though, regarding what you say about film.. I might have to disagree. You'd be stupid to say film is not an art form... but I took "cinema appreciation" classes all throughout high school and we maybe watched one film made by an LA director. In terms of "art house cinema" I'd say the Europeans, the East Coast, Hong Kong, they all have us handily beat...

[Vangelist]

I consider Altman, Araki, Anderson, Lynch, Mann and even Tarantino to create bodies of work that specifically deal with the narrative of Los Angeles - you don't necessarily have to call them "LA directors," any more than Allen, Lumet and Lee are "New York" directors, for it's just one singular classification - and in noir's founding stages Wilder specifically set the genre here for a reason: it reverberates with the city. Even though arguably, the first noir ever was "Maltese Falcon," which was set in San Francisco

[dweebo2220]

agreed.. maybe it was stupid to say "handily beat."

Also, my cinema teacher was a wannabe european who never had anything good to say about LA. Maybe it was edluva?

[Vangelist]

Edluva is an angry asian man who probably got sick of Happy Family restaurant in Monterey Park since they didn't accept his debit card a few years ago...and now wants to take it out on the entire city of LA

[edluva]

Vangelist is an intellectual facsimile. He's a repackaged "pop" intellectual who says feel-good statements which offer little substantive weight and probably feels good dressing up like wheezer and posing with a book, but not actually reading it, in a vainly self-conscious hollywood cafe such as psychobabble. He doesn't really care what you have to say - he's like an intellectual weather vane - he only knows which direction a discussion is headed..for or against. He's a cheerleader and very appropriate for LA at that. :D

ocman - I can see where you're going with cinema, but even cinema can't be taken as a stand-alone movement, and it's even harder to draw analogies between film genres and artistic movements - movements which are themselves often derived from philosophical developments that dweebo may have surreptitiously touched upon in his statement about art paralleling human development.

For isntance: german expressionism manifested immediately in the visual arts, but it also manifested in predecessors to avant garde french cinema of the 50s-60s, notably Lang's "M", a german film, and the first film of the modern (sound) era, which happened to feature a criminal protagonist, and in this respect, cinema is merely another artistic medium through which the broader movement of german expressionism was channeled. It's not a source of a movement in itself. If you look at modernism, minimalism, and "postmodernism" in music, architecture, sculpture, and design, the same parallels can be drawn...and the fact that they share a common inspiration in a philosophical or literary tradition further my point. Of the acclaimed artistic capitals of this world, LA (acclaim of which is limited mostly to self-important angelenos, and not in line with the majority of humanity) has to this day never been the origin of a major literary, philosophical, or artistic tradition. In fact, LA has been noted for its unique dearth of influential literary figures.

And going back to dweebo's comment about art paralleling human development, I'm actually surprised anyone would touch upon this point as I'm the only other forumer I'm aware of who thinks this way. LA is "maturing" at the butt-end of western civilization's denoument. Western civilization probably peaked with NY's artistic peak. The future of art is not going to be purely western and LA is a bit late to the party. It's sort of like Seattle or Houston's never going to become a major artistic center to rival historic Paris - LA is in the same company. LA, like vangelist, is "cool" or "looks smart", but just like that michael graves coffee-maker you purchased at your local Target, or the ikea desk chair vagely reminiscent of an arne jacobsen but lacking all the spirit of one, it's no vanguard of invention. If NY is the 64 mustang, LA is the 2008 mustang.

[dweebo2220]

I think the correct metaphor is

"NY is the 64 mustang, LA is a BITCHIN' CAMARO!!"

[dweebo2220]

Ok, Edluva I agree with you almost entirely. But I don't think because Paris or New York matured at the peak of western civilization makes the people who live there now any more interesting. I'll take LA any day over those cities even though it hasn't been "validated" by a culture you admit is declining..

haha the DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION -- I grew up in the south bay and my brother has a black flag tattoo above his heart..

I just hope that LA can change enough over the next few decades to stay relevant in "whatever it is that comes next.."

[Vangelist]

Edluva - you're ridiculous. I meant my facile description of you as a form of reserved endearment, but you disparage me to no end, perhaps because I've been virulent in disagreeing with you in the past. If you compare me with Los Angeles in an effort to insult me though, I take it as a compliment, not in any abstract "postmodernist," way, but because I genuinely believe LA is a worthy cultural matrix - and if that's solipsistic and tautological in your taxonomies, that's fine with me. I could do without the personal attacks however (I'm being honest as someone with no intention of leaving this forum or being bullied by you) ...since I've never been malicious with anything I've said, and one would assume you'd be charitable enough to accommodate those with differing views - but if you're not, that speaks volumes of your own supposed intellectual "depth," substance and generosity. Many already think you're a misanthropic jerk to those with alternate views on here (LA-positive on an LA forum - who'd have thought?!) - and with your empty put-downs if you're sincerely trying to attack me in that last post, you prove it.
And for the record, I don't like Weezer (nice misspelling), and have only been to Psychobabble two times in 10 years - only because the other party insisted it. Nice try in attempting to stereotype me though; not even close.

[ocman]

Not cinema as a movement, but movements of artistic advancements within cinema. Social/cultural movements are manifested within a variety of mediums as you pointed with german expressionism. But you also have movements that are artistic and that exist specifically within a medium separate from any social/cultural movement. Cubism and abstract expressionism never successfully manifested in other art forms like music, cinema, theatre or literature. They both may have been responses to other artistic movements that were part of a social/cultural movement, but in and of itself, they were not. It's difficult to describe these movements in any political or social framework. There are philosophies behind those movements, but they are strictly artistic philosophies about art itself, and at best, are only incidental reflections of any social or political ideals of their times.

What I mean by movements in cinema are things like the french new wave, italian neorealism and dogme 95. With the possible exception of italian neorealism, none had any social or political context and were solely artistic responses to the state of cinema, and so therefore never manifested outside of cinema. So these are widely considered movements that are also film genres.

[Vangelist]

Dweebo I don't know why you're saying you "agree with edluva almost entirely," when everything you're type proves to the contrary. Stick to your arguments rather than placating one with a diametrically opposed view- or else it would be more in line if being the aforementioned "intellectual weather vane," wouldn't it ?

[Vangelist]

Cubism could be said to be representative of modernism as a whole. But you're correct that there are insular "artistic movements" within one art-form in itself, that have no corresponding social or cultural counterparts. Modernism, as an aesthetic, can only inform cubism, but not define it.

>What I mean by movements in cinema are things like the french new wave, italian neorealism and dogme 95.

While perhaps not a "movement," film Noir can be classified as a particular aesthetic that transcends genre considerations, as it articulates a very specific world-view, both in its settings as well as its characters' subjective mindsets and motivations. And in this it has a direct parallel with Noir fiction, as conceived by Raymond Chandler and John Fante, and even later writers like Walter Mosley and James Ellroy. And that aesthetic has a unique relationship with the city of Los Angeles.

[Vangelist]

Actually what edluva is saying is contradictory in itself. If the moment of western art has passed as western civ is in decline, and nothing will now compare with the apogee of New York art within the last half of the 20th cent.... then how is art that is currently produced in erstwhile artistic capitals such as New York, Paris or even Rome contemporaneously relevant? It's either all past an imaginary expiration date now, or still able to maintain its currency - and if the latter is the case, then the city of origin shouldn't matter as much as the city of production - and Los Angeles is one of the most prolific cities in terms of the production of modern art

[dweebo2220]

Dweebo I don't know why you're saying you "agree with edluva almost entirely," when everything you're type proves to the contrary. Stick to your arguments rather than placating one with a diametrically opposed view- or else it would be more in line if being the aforementioned "intellectual weather vane," wouldn't it ?

I just meant I agreed with most things in his last post. Oh and I should add I don't agree with his characterizations of you, vangelist. They were pretty much cheap shots that really didn't have anything to do with the argument..

You seem to have the same take as me: NO city today is a creative vanguard comparable to historic Paris or New York. Including contemporary Paris and New York. I don't choose where I live based on how cool/important they used to be. If artists thought like that they'd all live in Greece.

[svs]

And as someday it may happen that a victim must be found,
I've got a little list. I've got a little list
of society's offenders who might well be underground,
And who never will be missed, who never will be missed...

There's the idiot who praises in enthusiastic tone
All centuries but this and every country but his own......
-W.S. Gilbert (from The Mikado).


Of the acclaimed artistic capitals of this world, LA (acclaim of which is limited mostly to self-important angelenos, and not in line with the majority of humanity) has to this day never been the origin of a major literary, philosophical, or artistic tradition. In fact, LA has been noted for its unique dearth of influential literary figures.

And going back to dweebo's comment about art paralleling human development, I'm actually surprised anyone would touch upon this point as I'm the only other forumer I'm aware of who thinks this way. LA is "maturing" at the butt-end of western civilization's denoument. Western civilization probably peaked with NY's artistic peak. The future of art is not going to be purely western and LA is a bit late to the party. It's sort of like Seattle or Houston's never going to become a major artistic center to rival historic Paris - LA is in the same company. LA, like vangelist, is "cool" or "looks smart", but just like that michael graves coffee-maker you purchased at your local Target, or the ikea desk chair vagely reminiscent of an arne jacobsen but lacking all the spirit of one, it's no vanguard of invention. If NY is the 64 mustang, LA is the 2008 mustang.

This is total nonsense and is worse then boosting. LA has a very strong literary, musical, and cultural tradition going back at least seventy five years, even if many of the creators who lived in the city came here from other places. Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Aldous Huxley, Gore Vidal, Rachmaninoff, Charles Bukowski, Charles and Rae Eames, David Hockney, Robert Graham, Thomas Mann, Bertholt Brecht, Frank Gehry, Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Charles Mingus, L. Frank Baum, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eric Dolphy, Upton Sinclair, Raymond Chandler, Nathaniel West, Joan Didion, Evelyn Waugh, John Fante, Walter Mosley, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, Harlan Ellison, Neutra, Schindler, Lautner, etc. are just a small number of the creative people who have lived and produced here.


You mention the 64 mustang but forget the Corvette was designed out in LA.

If you have to troll, pick on another city. I for one am really tired of your put downs of the city where you live. There are a lot of centers of creativity in the world. LA is certainly one of them and has been for a long time.

[sopas ej]

I think the correct metaphor is

"NY is the 64 mustang, LA is a BITCHIN' CAMARO!!"

I don't like any of those metaphors... I associate Camaros with white trash, along with the newer Mustangs... I'm sure I'm not the only one? :shrug:

[dweebo2220]

bitchin' camaro was a Dead Milkmen song.

[sopas ej]

bitchin' camaro was a Dead Milkmen song.

Ah, OK.

[sopas ej]

Edluva is an angry asian man who probably got sick of Happy Family restaurant in Monterey Park since they didn't accept his debit card a few years ago...and now wants to take it out on the entire city of LA

Hehe! What is it with certain ethnic restaurants (I won't specify which ethnicity, I'm sure you guys can figure it out, it's usually the same ones) where they have signs that say "Minimum $15 (or whatever) for credit card"? Someone I knew told me that that's actually illegal, that if a business has a decal that says they take MC, Visa, etc., then they must accept that for ANY transaction, no matter how large or small; technically they should be able to do a credit card transaction even for 5 cents. It's obvious to me that they're just being stingy, because for every credit card transaction, they're charged a fee, so they must feel that they're getting more for their fee if the transaction is for a more substantial amount. Stupid.

And what's up with the places that in the 21st century are still cash only? Again, probably stinginess.... they don't wanna pay for the service fees.

[LAsam]

A post by Edluva is like a splash of cold water on your face.

[sopas ej]

LA is "maturing" at the butt-end of western civilization's denoument. Western civilization probably peaked with NY's artistic peak.

Could you elaborate and explain why you feel that "western civilization" is on the decline? I honestly feel it hasn't even reached its peak yet.

Now, when it comes to the United States, sure, I think it's on the decline. But western civilization?

[LosAngelesBeauty]

I just meant I agreed with most things in his last post. Oh and I should add I don't agree with his characterizations of you, vangelist. They were pretty much cheap shots that really didn't have anything to do with the argument..

You seem to have the same take as me: NO city today is a creative vanguard comparable to historic Paris or New York. Including contemporary Paris and New York. I don't choose where I live based on how cool/important they used to be. If artists thought like that they'd all live in Greece.

Or China for that matter...

[StethJeff]

Or China for that matter...

When has China ever been cool to anyone? :shrug:

Important and influential, but cool?

[JDRCRASH]

Could you elaborate and explain why you feel that "western civilization" is on the decline? I honestly feel it hasn't even reached its peak yet.

Now, when it comes to the United States, sure, I think it's on the decline. But western civilization?

I've really grown tired lately of Edluva's inane comments about how he thinks that Los Angeles will never have a bright future ahead of it, and how even if it DOES recreate that work,live,play atmosphere, it will resemble New York.:sly:

The reality is that the basic rule of most cities is to grow and industrialize into an Urban Metropolis.

[sopas ej]

I've really grown tired lately of Edluva's inane comments about how he thinks that Los Angeles will never have a bright future ahead of it, and how even if it DOES recreate that work,live,play atmosphere, it will resemble New York.:sly:

The reality is that the basic rule of most cities is to grow and industrialize into an Urban Metropolis.


Work, live, play atmosphere? *LA* doesn't have that?

Right now I'm more at issue with the comment that western civilization is on the decline. I mean, just because the US is going downhill doesn't mean the rest of the western world is. In fact I've entertained off and on the idea of moving to the EU.

As a further aside, I feel the US was at its most intellectual, technological and culturally creative BEFORE it became a world power, what with the inventions of the 19th and early 20th centuries, authors of that period, cinema, jazz, FDR's New Deal (he was probably the most socialist president the US has ever had, and I praise him for it), etc. We're all raised with the belief that the US was ALWAYS number one, when in fact it has only been a world power since the end of World War II. Prior to that, many Europeans saw the US as a cultural backwater (New York City included), even though even during that period, they listened to our music and watched our films. I was told by a professor of mine that it wasn't until the 1980s that Europeans finally started letting Americans teach English there, they used to consider our English to be substandard.

[LosAngelesBeauty]

Bagging on LA gives edluva something to do. IF he were to be constrained to the NYC forums exclusively, what would he actually do? Agree with people that NYC is awesome and wonderful and a bag of chips? That would be boring. IT's more fun for him to pick on a city that is handicapped without the kind of urban qualities (like rail and pedestrian culture) than to constantly praise NYC (which we all know is great anyway).

[Vangelist]

But what's so distorted on these forums is that we're only looking at/glorifying one aspect of what a locale may have to offer: the forever-ill-defined and vague "urbanity," (which, if LA lacks it, can't be defined by density or diversity or amount of cultural activities, only...um, pedestrian activity. Yes?) That's why NYC is deified on here. Yet when I talk to some of my New York friends (who may not necessarily be skyscraper enthusiasts), they complain occasionally about the lack of space or air or sunlight, or more generally the lack of access to "Nature," ...("central park isn't cutting it") and the feeling of being trapped, sans means of escape (esp. when you've sold your car) in that "concrete jungle." But LA is never praised here for having access to mountains, oceans or other forms of nature and the recreation that they bring; on the contrary, if we have an abundance of opportunities for outdoor activities here, we must be anti-intellectual bimbos. Sometimes I wonder if the (usually adolescent-/collegiate sounding) "urbanity" fanboys that inhabit these boards (by that I mean here and SSC) have ever actually *spent considerable time* in New York, since their take is so one-sided (inspired by an awe of tall buildings. But hey, the websites are living up to their names).

Yet NYC at least is impressive when it comes to the promise of those old-school metropolitan glories - it's sheer scope and size do make it almost incomparable in all it has to offer. What really has my head scratching is the unbalanced praise a city like Chicago gets on these forums- before I came to SSC a few years ago, I had *never* experienced anything like that all-consuming worship towards it before, and was confused by all the boosterism for what in life I'd always observed being acknowledged as a fine, but pretty unspectacular American city who's time had passed (and yes, I've been plenty; my brother lives there). Maybe it'll win the Olympics and that will cement its revitalization (?) in the public's mind, and I'm wrong, but in off-board interactions and discussions I still haven't discovered anything close to the adoration it gets on here..

It's only later that I came to realize that most people identify *personally* with their home cities on here as the average non-poster might identify with a home sports team - and that most commentaries are basically disguised "city vs. city" discussions that degenerate into pissing contests. At least SSP moderates them better than SSC did back in the day. But to put up with one particular poster who only castigates other posters while they're trying to defend their own city in its own forum while generally having nothing constructive to say - that's nothing short of trolling, and I don't know why it's been tolerated here so long. Because so-and-so's an "old timer" and has thousands of posts to his credit? That shouldn't justify anything.

[LosAngelesBeauty]

^ Fflint used to be the moderator for Califorums. He would NEVER allow anyone to criticize SF. I did, and as a result, was suspended for 2 weeks for, yes, apparently "trolling" like you said. lol And the funny thing is, my posts were a small fraction of how critical edluva's can be for LA.

[Vangelist]

Yes I remember how fflint was intolerant of anyone uttering even a thoughtfully critical word against SF. Who is moderating this forum right now? Is it Colemonkee yet?

[edluva]

LAB, everybody knows your views of LA have been a little inane themselves, to say the least. And you're probably one of the more "grounded" guys on here. That's the slightly funny part, with your obnoxious plugs for "west-central" as though trying to brainwash it into common usage. No wonder fflint got annoyed of you. And I would have plenty of things to say about NY - trust me. They just wouldn't be about its level of education, the significance of its literary and arts history, its sense of identity and place, or its transporation network. Is it really that controversial that I think spewing millions of tons of carbon into the atmosphere and having little sense of community is a bit of an inferior alternative?

Vangelist - I'm not trolling. I'm an angeleno, so what you say about boosterism has little merit, at least here. And I do agree with you, for once, about chicago's overratedness. It's a great town, but my personal experience with it has never justified all the fuss surrounding it. I love it to pieces still but I've seen lots of places in my time and I'm not easy to impress. But I maintain that angelenos are probably the most ignorant denizens of all - their ideas about their city, and there are many extreme and mutually exclusive versions circulating around, are based in such fantasy that I can't help but react in the other extreme. LA has its positives, but functionally, it's got more negatives than most other cities modern out there. It's an ecological disaster for one -there are things about it which I could not ever in good conscience defend, not matter how biased I wish I could be. Others here, on the other hand, defend LA with a level of ignorance fit for montroseneighborhood. Take it for what it's worth.

sopasej - Western civilization is not "going downhill" perse, but America's role is definitely waning, and LA's various arts fads (we had one similar to this in the 80s when NY was all the rage, remember?) have never reached a level of global importance that would put it in a position comparable to where NY or Paris were in their times. It's sort of like LA's supposed rise to capital of S&L status in the 80s "to rival NY as the financial capital". So a solitary billionaire's self-serving proclamation of LA's global stature does not do enough to convince me, nor probably any future retrospective of LA's visual arts "scenes", otherwise. The fact that Beijing and Berlin each have tremendous "scenes" of their own which at this point in the commercial world, outrank LA's, temper any boosterish claims to the contrary. Nowadays LA does some interesting subgenres of pop art such as "low-brow", which are at their best, even less important than the "superflat" fad of team Murakami. but as much as we'd want contemporary art of the 50s and 60s to be defined by *our* stars (hopper, ruscha, etc), they will always be remembered as being in the shadows of, and in homage to, the lichtensteins, the warhols, the pollocks, the Newmans, the rothkos, and the dekoonings of contemporary or abstract art. BCAM only reinforces that reality by paying credence to NY's art world, rather than stealing thunder from it as it was supposed to. Funny how truth pans out in the end anyways doesn't it?

The phenomenon of your (Vangelist's) defensiveness is a small-town phenomenon. Kind of like Toronto's inflated importance arising out of being the "new york of canada". ruscha et al sound more important to angeleno boosters than reality and some balanced perspective would have it. Small-town heroes in a big-town world. Play-on, playas.

[LosAngelesBeauty]

Well it might have been inane, but I think West Central is definitely a bit different from the rest of LA County and the Southland, so trying (maybe in vain) to come up with some kind of identification isn't outrageous.

And I don't think fflint got annoyed with me only because of something petty like me trying to coin a moniker for a subsection of LA. I really think I was suspended because I said some unflattering things about SF unlike what you might say about LA.

[edluva]

well, I wasn't following the circumstances surrounding your suspension but if you'll notice, my criticisms tend to be completely "legal" - when against LA, not intentionally trying to stir unnecessary conflict (the definition of trolling), when against a forumer, adressed in such a way as to attack the forumer's statement's, not the forumer directly, or if in a direct attack, thinly veiled as sarcasm - though I have been deleted from time to time, I don't persist in being obnoxious. narrow line that I tread and perhaps you crossed one without realizing?

[Vangelist]

Um, I don't think anyone could still verifiably call anything about LA "small town," seriously, and I doubt the hierarchy you're trying to establish between those contemp. artists really exists to that great a degree (between "new york artists" and "la artists," or east and west coast) - why?

Because one's geographic presence is but *one* small aspect of the discourse of classifying an artist's work: one amongst many. Overall, I think you'd agree that one's general aesthetic or broad movement (modernism, contemporary, new wave, etc. ) is the most common way to group artists, followed by or perhaps hand-in-hand with time/era groupings, and we're only talking about a largely abstract aspect of "civic ownership" that a location may claim to have on an artist/his work - because we're on a goddamned "urbanity forum." In serious discussions of art, how much is Pollock's "new york"-ness a factor while discussing his work - how much does it even define him? Not much, and not more than, say, the Mexican muralist he worked with in NYC. And that's just one example...of course, the answers may vary from artist to artist (for Warhol, the Factory most certainly couldn't have thrived in Des Moines - but I'm not sure if Warhol's own identity was cemented with being a "New Yorker").

And that flexibility re: identity is just the point. We're getting caught up in trivial urban distinctions (more important to us than anyone else off-board) when perhaps the greatest of artists are true cosmopolitans who can move from city to city and define their surroundings, instead of being defined by them (ex: Henry Miller wasn't a "Parisian novelist" - or was he?). All of us do not define ourselves by the city we're currently inhabiting: ever talk to a military brat? It might even be a negligible factor, inconceivable as that may be to us posting here. I myself am working in a creative industry and might be (for at least part of the year) moving to NYC for career-reasons within the next decade...
...does that mean I'll have an identity crisis? No. I might associate the work I'm doing at *this* time of my life with LA, but I'm not even sure I can unequivocally call it "LA work," as it could very well have been produced in another city I was living in for the past 10/11 years. And as has been mentioned in this thread earlier, the world is getting smaller, boundaries are breaking and there is probably more in common with big city life (culturally) in diversity-oriented metros like LA and London and NY, etc. than different - if you're talking about access to traveling shows, art exhibitions, and the like. I happen to feel comfortable in LA at the moment, since that *relative* lack of traditional "identity," (there are 4 million different LAs) and abstract quality is liberating to me (even though I think you overstate it at times, for the city still indeed DOES have a very "real" sense of place/history/self - it may even be a crooked one a la Chinatown), as is the lack of any clear ethnic majority. And because I like chaos - but that's just a personal trait.

Ultimately, there can be no denying all of LA's gigantic problems and dangers - it's a planner's nightmare, but I don't think there's a single poster here who's not aware of all that. I'd still like to optimistically believe that it's a "work-in-progress" (which I prefer over the sterile lack of dynamism in a museum-piece like SF), but who knows: if solutions adapting it to catch up with er, even the 20th century (hello, transport) aren't found soon, my optimism might be just as naive as a native of Mumbai's - and you already know the similar, BIG-city issues (not anything to be proud of). But sometimes, you have to remember that people want to still feel a sense of worth and well-being in their chosen residence, and focus on the (small) progress that's taking place, or in LA's case, its continued relevance (for now) - and that's why, they'd like to point out, discuss and post those positives here, rather than incessantly being reminded of the problems. I don't really think it's "boosterism," it's more akin to actually living up to the point of these LA-specific boards. Finally, I don't think one could irrefutably state that Berlin is "outranking" LA in the contemp. art world and certainly not Beijing - and as I was there in '05, if you want to talk ecological disasters...let me tell you: Beijing is terrifying (you can virtually see the black skies, forget trying to breathe).

But don't let this overwritten post of "boostering" distract ya'll from discussing whether edluva is "trolling" or not - despite how many previous times you've had this conversation (in public or private)

[LosAngelesBeauty]

well, I wasn't following the circumstances surrounding your suspension but if you'll notice, my criticisms tend to be completely "legal" - when against LA, not intentionally trying to stir unnecessary conflict (the definition of trolling), when against a forumer, adressed in such a way as to attack the forumer's statement's, not the forumer directly, or if in a direct attack, thinly veiled as sarcasm - though I have been deleted from time to time, I don't persist in being obnoxious. narrow line that I tread and perhaps you crossed one without realizing?

I honestly don't know.

[edluva]

^oh but that's where you're wrong vangelist. the commercial high-art/low-art dichotomy is exactly that brought warhol and his new york contemporaries to fame. you're attempting to tease out new york high-society's gallery scene from the rise of new york artists to global prominence when it is precisely the commercial aspect of new york's art scene that made it so, and likewise with paris in the lat 19th century. The gallery scene, the rising global importance of NYC and its wealthy collectors, the *society* of collectors (LA is completely lacking in "society" for reasons I'll not repeat here), the ongoing dialogue between NY artists and their often harsh art critics, and ultimately, the global influence of these artists and the art itself, they are all one and the same - LA lacks the relevance, power, and community (the dialogue) to create such demand. LA is completely lacking in a society of *prominent* local arts patrons and completely lacking of local artists whose works rose to prominence within the timeframe of own careers. They are currently only being "salvaged" by retrospective...being "given their due", and thus, cannot be said to have influenced anyone (obviously they were a self-proclaimed tribe of "unknowns" that nobody cared about, right?)

As far as the art itself- you'd be extremely naive to suggest that individual artists in NY were working in self-contianed bubbles, completely untouched by the influence of their contemporaries - the fact that you suggested such a thing with such gusto would earn plenty of chuckles from art historians. The uptown group, for instance, is a diverse collection of rival, infamously egotistical new york artists which included Newman, Gottlieb, Rothko, and Pollock each of whom was intensely conscious of his place in the rivalry. Each artist owes a tremendous debt to this dynamic in his works.

To deny the role that NY's urbanism may have had on the development of abstract expressionism and contemporary art is to deny any role you hypothesize LA's unique set of circumstances might have had on your agenda - an agenda of whose position does not register among people who actually know what they're talking about, btw. Beijing artists are garnering much more notoriety (and money) than Angeleno artists in the global art scene; in the most highly venerated markets for high-art collectors (eg saatchi, gagosian, etc)....your small-town parochialism inflates your perception of LA's importance yet again. Obviously LA is a big town, duh, "small town" is used metaphorically - did I really have to explain this to you?

[Vangelist]

I was not saying that NYC's art community and "gallery world" had no effect on its artists, but was questioning the role of how much their artistic identity - and the context in which their art is talked about - is always tied to their "New York" identity, in a greater point that civic identity isn't immutable. Note I said it must vary for each artist. I think you're the one jumping with gusto at a chance to "expose" my "ignorance" of art history - and by extension, any claim that I can make to LA's relevancy - when it's amusing that almost all here think you're basically trolling by arguing these same points with me again and again.

I thought I might have had a chance of burying any sort of contention with you by making a neutral (I'd have thought!) point of the flexibility of identity when it comes to geography (and our own overemphasis on it here by comparison) - but I was dead wrong. I'll make sure to not make similar mistakes in the future; thanks.

[edluva]

well, you're interpreting art in the wrong way if you're seeking some literal affirmation of NYC (eg thin-slice pizza figurative?) as "identity" I'll say that much.

and fwiw, I'm not "trolling" by virtue of bringing your ignorance to light - it's your commanding sense of confidence coupled by your yes, obvious lack of knowledge, that elicits what sounds like trolling. I'm not trying to play nice - but I am pretty honest (blunt). Sorry if this offends you. If you were seeking to "bury contention", then I want you to know that I appreciate that...but too late for kiss and makeup, I guess. Believe it or not I too would prefer to "bury contentions"

[JDRCRASH]

It's pretty clear that there is a forumer that has trolling with stealth shows little respect for the city's position in the world and how it's progressing for the better every year. He is completely oblivious to the reality that high rises do not alone justify labeling a city Urban. Heck, there are rumors flying around lately that there are communities in Los Angeles that are more dense than some in New York City!


But seriously, is Edluva a person that was originally from New York?
His comments are too negative for him to be considered a Los Angeles born citizen. At the very least, he should be suspended on counts of trolling on a thread with posters that for the most part, have not retaliated with responses that have same baseless daftarsism that this forumer is continuously displaying throughout the L.A. threads. It needs to stop, because we are unable to have a conversation stating what Los Angeles has that other places don't, without naming the obvious.

[Echo Park]

daftarsism?

this is my favorite thread btw. edluva's dismantling of vangelist was a delight to read. would read again. 5/5

[Vangelist]

Perhaps I'm not "interpreting art in the wrong way," as much as a different way - and I don't care if you want to condescendingly spin this as a "victory," by pointing out my ignorance of art history again just because I vehemently disagree with you and choose to unabashedly stick up for LA. I've already detailed how you distorted what I wrote - I wasn't minimizing NYC's influential and dynamic "gallery scene"/community which was conducive and integral to its artists at all, but just questioning the extent of a stamped-upon "NY'er" identity on all their respective works; I also made a point that geographic location is but one form of classification, which you ignored. But if you're going to continue to post here, which I assume you are, I'd rather it be without a sense of conflict. Since I'm not going anywhere either, surprise. I was warned by enough other posters (in private) who loathe you to not engage with your invective, but I chose to do so myself, and don't mind stimulating discussions where perhaps all involved can learn something - but not if we keep going in empty, well-worn circles that lead nowhere. Thx for the "apology" - but you shouldn't have to mitigate your words in the first place (i invite antagonism with my posting style occasionally, as you noted).

>this is my favorite thread btw. edluva's dismantling of vangelist was a delight to read. would read again. 5/5

Haha - well of course you'd like to read edluva's shit: you're the only other anti-LA poster that's a regular on here, and once called the city an "overgrown Tulsa by the sea," (as well as starting that hilarious "does it all depress you" thread - our answer was: no, but it depresses YOU!)... and as I mentioned above, a collegiate type that glorifies NYC without ever having lived there; go knock yourself out jerking off over skyscraper pics. After spending my childhood in the eastern cities, and considerable time (all my summers) abroad, I have a pretty different point of view - but then again I'm not some kid from the SGV who despises LA as suburban trash, as I can appreciate it - limitations and all - for what it is.

And just for the record, this isn't meant to sound intolerant of people who have problems with LA (who DOESN'T? on some level), and classify them as unfit to post here - a plurality of opinions on the different aspects of living here should always be encouraged. But it's not exactly rah-rah cheerleading/boosterism to point out particular posters who only criticize the city on highly subjective grounds, and then project that out as some sort of universal truth, when their non-stop put-downs of the place they live - as svs noted way above - are nothing but predictable, jejune rants that contribute NOTHING to a conversation, but only endlessly regurgitate complaints that we've heard a million times before. (For example, posting on a daily basis in the Toronto forum of how "it's such a cold city, it sucks!" would similarly begin to grate).

[LosAngelesBeauty]

^ Agreed. There should definitely be plurality as I have tried to bring more focus of the realities of the environment and its limitations on mankind's hubris wanton - artistic merit or not is irrelevant when it comes to physical limitations. Nevertheless, I hope we can have SOME optimism for the future (even with peak oil upon us) to discuss what we all have an interest in, which is LA.

[Sedition]

Perhaps I'm not "interpreting art in the wrong way," as much as a different way - and I don't care if you want to condescendingly spin this as a "victory," by pointing out my ignorance of art history again just because I vehemently disagree with you and choose to unabashedly stick up for LA. I've already detailed how you distorted what I wrote - I wasn't minimizing NYC's influential and dynamic "gallery scene"/community which was conducive and integral to its artists at all, but just questioning the extent of a stamped-upon "NY'er" identity on all their respective works; I also made a point that geographic location is but one form of classification, which you ignored. But if you're going to continue to post here, which I assume you are, I'd rather it be without a sense of conflict. Since I'm not going anywhere either, surprise. I was warned by enough other posters (in private) who loathe you to not engage with your invective, but I chose to do so myself, and don't mind stimulating discussions where perhaps all involved can learn something - but not if we keep going in empty, well-worn circles that lead nowhere. Thx for the "apology" - but you shouldn't have to mitigate your words in the first place (i invite antagonism with my posting style occasionally, as you noted).

>this is my favorite thread btw. edluva's dismantling of vangelist was a delight to read. would read again. 5/5

Haha - well of course you'd like to read edluva's shit: you're the only other anti-LA poster that's a regular on here, and once called the city an "overgrown Tulsa by the sea," (as well as starting that hilarious "does it all depress you" thread - our answer was: no, but it depresses YOU!)... and as I mentioned above, a collegiate type that glorifies NYC without ever having lived there; go knock yourself out jerking off over skyscraper pics. After spending my childhood in the eastern cities, and considerable time (all my summers) abroad, I have a pretty different point of view - but then again I'm not some kid from the SGV who despises LA as suburban trash, as I can appreciate it - limitations and all - for what it is.

And just for the record, this isn't meant to sound intolerant of people who have problems with LA (who DOESN'T? on some level), and classify them as unfit to post here - a plurality of opinions on the different aspects of living here should always be encouraged. But it's not exactly rah-rah cheerleading/boosterism to point out particular posters who only criticize the city on highly subjective grounds, and then project that out as some sort of universal truth, when their non-stop put-downs of the place they live - as svs noted way above - are nothing but predictable, jejune rants that contribute NOTHING to a conversation, but only endlessly regurgitate complaints that we've heard a million times before. (For example, posting on a daily basis in the Toronto forum of how "it's such a cold city, it sucks!" would similarly begin to grate).

I'm almost exclusively a reader on these forums, but I just wanted to poke my head in to say "thank you" Vangelist, for continuing to post here. You make this board an interesting place, despite the presence of people like edluva.

[edluva]

:cheers:

[dweebo2220]

why I'm still here:

http://www.hubculture.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=152&Itemid=44

[bricky]

I'm only an infrequent poster on the LA subforum (since I no longer live in California), but for what it's worth, I think edluva almost single-handedly saves a lot of threads here from becoming inane booster affairs. His posts, while almost always critical, are at least intelligent. Threads where everyone basically agrees are anyway really boring. Viva edluva!

By the way, most New Yorkers with some experience in LA secretly envy the place. At least in some senses. And it's an unusual honor, if you guys want it. I figure the only metros that NYers as a group respect in the US are LA, SF/Silicon Valley, and to a lesser extent Boston and Washington. Everywhere else here is thought of as the boonies, including Chicago (which I never hear about in real life). From a sociological or built-form perspective, LA has a huge number of problems. But from an upper-middle-class point of view, life in LA can be sweet. Reading this very pro- traditional urbanism forum, I sometimes forget how much I loved Southern California while I was there. Since we are after all individuals with our own personal experiences and narratives, it's natural to take a step back from broad city-wide problems which are distributed and felt very unequally, and just enjoy what is often a very pleasant existence in the Westside, Pasadena, coastal OC, etc.

[dweebo2220]

um.. I'm going to ignore the rest of that worm can... But,

I do agree that I like reading Edluva's posts. I like elitism and intellectual snobbery. (Seriously, I'm not joking. I hate how anti-intellectual America has become) Unfortunately I can't win at that game since I have no memory for facts or names --I end up going more for the heartland vote-- but I like to see that someone's holding it down.

Also, Edluva, since you do seem to have a grasp of contemporary art world (sale prices, etc.) I'd appreciate if you could point me in the direction of some sort of resources to get a better understanding of this stuff. At the end of the day no newspaper or casual blog cuts it for that kind of thing.

I believe you that some recently established Berlin artists or Beijing artists currently sell for more than angeleno artists, but it seems like the hype around "LA" is stronger than that around "Berlin" or "Beijing" as places to watch. I may be wrong (again I get my limited info from NYTimes, a few blogs, and a bunch of friends in the NY and LA art scenes).

[Vangelist]

>>I'm almost exclusively a reader on these forums, but I just wanted to poke my head in to say "thank you" Vangelist, for continuing to post here. You make this board an interesting place, despite the presence of people like edluva.<<

Thank you. I wasn't trying to make this a referendum on edluva's "worth" as a poster. But I am curious, now that dweebo brings it up: can he actually stop making ad hominem attacks (about other posters' sensibilities, or my level of knowledge, or whatever) and back up his own statements - in this particular case, how about sharing at least 2-3 concrete sources that demonstrate that Beijing specifically *outranks* LA's contemporary art scene? It would be just one example (out of many hyper-critical instances) of proving his intellectual honesty, forget about superiority

[svs]

Interesting. I happen to have a cousin who is an up and coming artist living in New York. He shows at a major gallery in SOHO and another in Chelsea. He is being displayed by two galleries one from London and another from New York at the current armory show. He has shown in London, Paris, Brussels, etc. and he gets as much as $10,000 for some of his his works. Not bad for a kid still in his thirties. I only mention this to establish his credentials in the New York Art world.

His opinion is that the major American city producing work that interests him and his artist friends besides New York is Los Angeles. He admits to being influenced by Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy, two Los Angeles artists.

Now Los Angeles may be shit to our friend edluva, but not to this New York artist and his friends. It also was impressive enough for the Pompidou to present a major Paris-LA show a couple of years ago. I suppose David Hockey, Ed Ruscha, Robert Graham, Lari Pittman, Ed Keinholz, etc. don't mean much to edluva but that's his problem. I guess he doesn't consider Broad, Norton Simon, or Frederick Weissman or David Geffen to be major collectors either.

While recognizing New York's historic primacy among American art centers, it is totally ignorant to pretend that nothing of importance ever happens outside of New York. I really don't find edluva's comments all that intelligent, but rather sophmoric. Its very easy to tear down, somewhat harder to find value.

You don't have to be a mindless booster to recognize the creative side of LA. You don't have to prove that LA is more important than New York to state the obvious that LA is a center of creativity in the US. I am really tired of pseudosophisticates who try to build themselves up by tearing others down.

LA will never equal the collections of old masters found in the New York Museums. It staarted building its cultural institutions more than a century after New York. But the gallery scene in this town is very vibrant, and scattered all over the city.

I'm not sure what the comment about LA "lacking society" is supposed to mean. If you mean rich people, there are plenty around. They don't show themselves in public as much as New York but they still manage to fill their Mansions in Holmby and Bel-Air with plenty of art. I've been privileged to go on some art tours sponsored by LACMA though not recently. You would be amazed at what is hiding behind the hedges in Beverly Hills.

[Vangelist]

After he finishes that, he can take on the next task - if he's serious about furthering discussion instead of provocation - and address svs and sopas' questions from earlier of backing up the alarmist claim that Western Civ is certifiably "over," / on the incorrigible decline, and that LA has no future relevancy as an art capital..

[svs]

I believe you that some recently established Berlin artists or Beijing artists currently sell for more than angeleno artists, but it seems like the hype around "LA" is stronger than that around "Berlin" or "Beijing" as places to watch. I may be wrong (again I get my limited info from NYTimes, a few blogs, and a bunch of friends in the NY and LA art scenes).

I would be really interested in knowing which Berlin or Beijing artists sell for higher prices than David Hockney.

[Vangelist]

Why don't we enumerate tasks for edluva if he wants to preserve all this legendary elitist superiority:

1) "Beijing." Credible sources (excluding your own blog or whatever). Thx.

2) Answer svs' long counter to your claims here:
Of the acclaimed artistic capitals of this world, LA (acclaim of which is limited mostly to self-important angelenos, and not in line with the majority of humanity) has to this day never been the origin of a major literary, philosophical, or artistic tradition. In fact, LA has been noted for its unique dearth of influential literary figures.

And going back to dweebo's comment about art paralleling human development, I'm actually surprised anyone would touch upon this point as I'm the only other forumer I'm aware of who thinks this way. LA is "maturing" at the butt-end of western civilization's denoument. Western civilization probably peaked with NY's artistic peak. The future of art is not going to be purely western and LA is a bit late to the party. It's sort of like Seattle or Houston's never going to become a major artistic center to rival historic Paris - LA is in the same company. LA, like vangelist, is "cool" or "looks smart", but just like that michael graves coffee-maker you purchased at your local Target, or the ikea desk chair vagely reminiscent of an arne jacobsen but lacking all the spirit of one, it's no vanguard of invention. If NY is the 64 mustang, LA is the 2008 mustang.
This is total nonsense and is worse then boosting. LA has a very strong literary, musical, and cultural tradition going back at least seventy five years, even if many of the creators who lived in the city came here from other places. Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Aldous Huxley, Gore Vidal, Rachmaninoff, Charles Bukowski, Charles and Rae Eames, David Hockney, Robert Graham, Thomas Mann, Bertholt Brecht, Frank Gehry, Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, Charles Mingus, L. Frank Baum, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Eric Dolphy, Upton Sinclair, Raymond Chandler, Nathaniel West, Joan Didion, Evelyn Waugh, John Fante, Walter Mosley, Robert Heinlein, Larry Niven, Harlan Ellison, Neutra, Schindler, Lautner, etc. are just a small number of the creative people who have lived and produced here.

You mention the 64 mustang but forget the Corvette was designed out in LA.

If you have to troll, pick on another city. I for one am really tired of your put downs of the city where you live. There are a lot of centers of creativity in the world. LA is certainly one of them and has been for a long time.


3) Answer sopas' questions and concerns here:
Could you elaborate and explain why you feel that "western civilization" is on the decline? I honestly feel it hasn't even reached its peak yet.

Now, when it comes to the United States, sure, I think it's on the decline. But western civilization?
Right now I'm more at issue with the comment that western civilization is on the decline. I mean, just because the US is going downhill doesn't mean the rest of the western world is. In fact I've entertained off and on the idea of moving to the EU.

As a further aside, I feel the US was at its most intellectual, technological and culturally creative BEFORE it became a world power, what with the inventions of the 19th and early 20th centuries, authors of that period, cinema, jazz, FDR's New Deal (he was probably the most socialist president the US has ever had, and I praise him for it), etc. We're all raised with the belief that the US was ALWAYS number one, when in fact it has only been a world power since the end of World War II. Prior to that, many Europeans saw the US as a cultural backwater (New York City included), even though even during that period, they listened to our music and watched our films. I was told by a professor of mine that it wasn't until the 1980s that Europeans finally started letting Americans teach English there, they used to consider our English to be substandard.


4) Could you explain, in some detail, why you're correct and the following figures, from the lengthy and detailed article quoted up above, are ALL wrong about how LA is a worthy artistic capital in its own right- not because it's "an answer to New York," but taken on its own grounds (as its traditions have little to do with wanting to emulate NY in the first place)? As the article notes, most are former New Yorkers. Stating that they "have" to boost LA as it relates to their day jobs now is *not* an acceptable answer, as many might move back to NYC at the end of their tenures - there's already speculation Govan will - and they don't really have to display any "loyalty" or allegiance to whichever city they're currently inhabiting
Deborah Borda, president and chief executive of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Assn.; Plácido Domingo, general director of Los Angeles Opera; Michael Govan, director and chief executive of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Michael Ritchie, artistic director of Center Theatre Group, which includes the Ahmanson Theatre, Mark Taper Forum and the Kirk Douglas Theatre; and James N. Wood, president and chief executive of the Getty Trust. Nearly all of them came to Los Angeles from the East Coast less than three years ago and discovered, to their surprise, a landscape ripe for development. Maybe they're all ignorant philistines who secretly post on Skyscraper Pages' "urbanity forum" in the Los Angeles section under secret cheerleading identities?! Could that be it?

5) Answer my question that you dodged (maybe you deigned it beneath you!) here: Actually what edluva is saying is contradictory in itself. If the moment of western art has passed as western civ is in decline, and nothing will now compare with the apogee of New York art within the last half of the 20th cent.... then how is art that is currently produced in erstwhile artistic capitals such as New York, Paris or even Rome contemporaneously relevant? It's either all past an imaginary expiration date now, or still able to maintain its currency - and if the latter is the case, then the city of origin shouldn't matter as much as the city of production - and Los Angeles is one of the most prolific cities in terms of the production of modern art

6) Answer something I was going to ask but skipped: why the reductionism regarding cinema? Frequently called the "greatest art form of the 20th century," cinema at its height is the synthesis of theater, painting, music and photography - and a major source of influence upon all the other arts in return (especially popular music, modern fiction and theater). So these statements: cinema is merely another artistic medium through which the broader movement of german expressionism was channeled. It's not a source of a movement in itself. seem either biased or baseless, and would be laughable to all film theorists, from Bazin to Mulvey on downwards to mainstream critics like Sarris or Rosenbaum. Why can movements to you only originate in a "philosophical or literary tradition," but not a cinematic one - especially when so much of our interaction with the modern world is mediated and through images these days (as many a postmodernist has noted) ? GE didn't orginate with cinema, but noir, new wave, neorealism, etc. all did and have visibly influenced other mediums. This isn't 1938 anymore; I don't understand your position here at all.

[Vangelist]

Oh, and try to do all of the preceding without engaging in your trademark "sarcasm" (I needed to add those quotes =), or sounding condescending, patronizing, digressing into strawman arguments or ad hominem attacks, and casting aspersions on the intelligence and taste of other forumers. Have fun!

[ocman]

I would be really interested in knowing which Berlin or Beijing artists sell for higher prices than David Hockney.


Hockney is at least a british artist as much as he is an LA artist, so I don't know if he counts. But a contemporary artist from Beijing sold for a couple million last year or 2 years ago, which put the artist in the upper echelon of contemporary art sales history and pretty much started the western invasion of buyers for everything chinese contemporary art.

But comparisons between these cities are dubious. Whether Beijing is the "It" city of this year, or LA of last year, or Berlin/Leipzig the year before or Mexico City next year, I don't really understand how this all add to anything. The internationality of the art scene isn't refuted. And neither is the fickleness and speculative nature of the art buyer's market. The difference is that LA has been on the art radar for a few decades now, and since then, the city has consistently produced international successful artists who are proving to have staying power. Yeah, they aren't Rothko, DeKooning, Pollock, Newman, Warhol or Lichtenstein, but I don't know if this comparison is not dubious. They're all dead. The LA stars, for the most, are still alive. It isn't a comparison between contemporaries. They're at least a generational divide as I can think of none who found prominence during abstract expressionism (the first four named). Warhol and Lichtenstein are from pop art and maybe Ruscha qualifies for pop art, but the stars 20 years ago are still the stars now, in that they'd still qualify as contemporary artists who are still working.

The Whitney Biennial this year had a significant portion made up of LA artists. The city's artists are being shown everywhere. LA art has gone global. And it's more than being a creative capital. The museum culture here is at least half the story. MOCA, LACMA, Hammer, even the Center for Land Use Interpretation are putting on really good shows, and are getting the attention for it too.

[ocman]

I'm not sure what the comment about LA "lacking society" is supposed to mean. If you mean rich people, there are plenty around. They don't show themselves in public as much as New York but they still manage to fill their Mansions in Holmby and Bel-Air with plenty of art. I've been privileged to go on some art tours sponsored by LACMA though not recently. You would be amazed at what is hiding behind the hedges in Beverly Hills.

We have society. it's just that sadly, stupidly and sycophantly, they all donate their art to the east coast!

[JDRCRASH]

[QUOTE=Echo Park;3484111]daftarsism?[/ QUOTE]

Of course the word DOESN'T exist silly; do you honestly believe that I would use a word that I knew wasn't real?

[sopas ej]

sopasej - Western civilization is not "going downhill" perse, but America's role is definitely waning, and LA's various arts fads (we had one similar to this in the 80s when NY was all the rage, remember?) have never reached a level of global importance that would put it in a position comparable to where NY or Paris were in their times. It's sort of like LA's supposed rise to capital of S&L status in the 80s "to rival NY as the financial capital". So a solitary billionaire's self-serving proclamation of LA's global stature does not do enough to convince me, nor probably any future retrospective of LA's visual arts "scenes", otherwise. The fact that Beijing and Berlin each have tremendous "scenes" of their own which at this point in the commercial world, outrank LA's, temper any boosterish claims to the contrary. Nowadays LA does some interesting subgenres of pop art such as "low-brow", which are at their best, even less important than the "superflat" fad of team Murakami. but as much as we'd want contemporary art of the 50s and 60s to be defined by *our* stars (hopper, ruscha, etc), they will always be remembered as being in the shadows of, and in homage to, the lichtensteins, the warhols, the pollocks, the Newmans, the rothkos, and the dekoonings of contemporary or abstract art. BCAM only reinforces that reality by paying credence to NY's art world, rather than stealing thunder from it as it was supposed to. Funny how truth pans out in the end anyways doesn't it?


America's role definitely is waning, absolutely, we both agree with that. But as far as your opinion about western civilization, you haven't covered that in your response. And I realize, after all, that the topic of this thread is LA being an art capital; when I mentioned "America's role" and "western civilization," I meant it in the overall sense, not just in the art sense.

I'm not really into the "art scene." I wasn't even aware that Beijing at present has a "tremendous art scene," that actually surprises me; I never thought of Beijing as a hotbed of creativity, at least not in the last century, but that's just me.

[bricky]

America's role definitely is waning, absolutely, we both agree with that. But as far as your opinion about western civilization, you haven't covered that in your response. And I realize, after all, that the topic of this thread is LA being an art capital; when I mentioned "America's role" and "western civilization," I meant it in the overall sense, not just in the art sense.

I'm not really into the "art scene." I wasn't even aware that Beijing at present has a "tremendous art scene," that actually surprises me; I never thought of Beijing as a hotbed of creativity, at least not in the last century, but that's just me.

America just happens to find itself in a fallow period, kind of like the 1970s. This is not the first nor the last time people are talking about permanent American decline. Even though I'm not too old at 29, I'm still old enough to remember the last wave, in the late 1980s and especially early 1990s. Not that I think China will go the way of the Japanese "threat", but America will for our lifetimes remain one of the great centers of the world. And a personal pet peeve of mine is coastal Americans treating the EU as some sort of higher universe. Nothing betrays naivete and provincialism more.

Anyway, someone made an interesting point about places like Berlin and Beijing being essentially the flavor of the month, while LA has had more of a steady but not white-hot status for decades. The amount of dollars invested in the Chinese art market probably has very little to do with the quality of the actual art, and more to do with newly rich Chinese wanting to buy their own artists, and outsiders realizing that with the tremendous growth in China, Chinese art values are a one-way bet. Something similar is happening on a smaller scale with Indian artists, as befits a still much smaller but hyped up Indian market.

[LAsam]

I often wonder if Edluva writes posts, fully knowing the kind of reaction he will get, then sits back and smiles to himself as everyone rails against him. He certainly is good at sparking debate.

[sopas ej]

America just happens to find itself in a fallow period, kind of like the 1970s. This is not the first nor the last time people are talking about permanent American decline. Even though I'm not too old at 29, I'm still old enough to remember the last wave, in the late 1980s and especially early 1990s. Not that I think China will go the way of the Japanese "threat", but America will for our lifetimes remain one of the great centers of the world. And a personal pet peeve of mine is coastal Americans treating the EU as some sort of higher universe. Nothing betrays naivete and provincialism more.

And not being able to note the glaring differences between quality of life in the EU and the US also betrays naivete and provincialism, if not denial. In college I made friends with foreign students from the EU, and we've kept in touch, even after they've moved back. When we compare notes, it's obvious which ones have better lifestyles, and I'm not even talking about money. Even their parents'/grandparents' lifestyles; it'd be unheard of for someone in their 70s in France, for example, to still be working. My Swedish friend finds it very odd that after working for a little over a year at my company, I've only earned barely 2 weeks of vacation; French people, by law, get 6 weeks of vacation a year. In Sweden, not only do they have maternity leave, they also have paternity leave, which I think is great... Don't fathers also deserve paid leave from work to help raise their newborns? I'm not even gonna get into healthcare or higher education.

But back to the US; I think the US is still a very good country to live in, and probably at one time it probably was arguably the best country to live in. But Americans need to realize, that other countries have since caught up and/or surpassed us, and there's nothing wrong with trying to improve upon our own situation here.

[bricky]

^^^ That Americans on average work more does not imply that they are somehow oppressed. Americans also earn more money, on average.

I've lived in the UK, and travelled extensively throughout Europe. I've also met tons of Europeans here in NY. While there are good points to both sides of the Atlantic, I'm not very sure that I could achieve there what I have achieved here. And I don't even work long hours! Generally, America has a far more dynamic economy, and a society that allows ambitious and educated newcomers to prosper tremendously (for example the immigrant founders of innumerable IT and other companies). Add to that the sheer material abundance of our middle and upper-middle classes, with their often massive houses, private swimming pools, huge amounts of space, expensive cars, prices that are well below Europe's and salaries that are as high or higher. Our universities are not free, but they are pretty much acknowledged to be the best in the world. I'll give you healthcare, but maybe we can get that taken care of with the next president...

Whatever... there's no need for a EU vs US thread. But there is also no need to actively agree with the condescension and facile stereotypes toward your own culture and country coming from some Europeans. It's frankly pathetic.

[svs]

We have society. it's just that sadly, stupidly and sycophantly, they all donate their art to the east coast!

A lot of this has of course happened in the past. Not a lot of people know for instance that the Hirshorn collection was first offered to Los Angeles and turned down by our idiot politicians of the time and the Ahrensberg collection which is the core of the Philadelphia Museum of Art's modern collection (includes the iconic Nude Descending a Staircase for example) was also turned down by the city.

But times have changed. How many cities have built as many major and minor institutions for displaying art in the last couple of decades. Both Gettys, the LACMA expansions, the Hammer, the new galleries and renovation of the Huntington, the Museum of California art in Pasadena, the galleries at the Bergamot Station and Chinatown, the ceramic museum in Pomona, the Irvine museum, OCMA, MOCA, the Geffen, the Fowler, etc. etc. MOCA has more art than it is able to display, a topic for anonther time. Though some west coast collections still end up on the east coast (I'm still sad we didn't land the Annenberg collection) plenty is staying right here. We certainly haven't passed New York but I really believe we have the best contemporary art scene in the US after New York and that is nothing to be ashamed of. Too many Angelinos get some kind of perverse pleasure dismissing LA. I don't understand why.

Some West coast collections will still go east. A lot of Angelinos myself included have a lot of east coast roots. And a lot of collectors will still continue to feel that donating to the leading east coast museums will give them more "prestige". Putting down our local institutions will not help to change that attitude.

[svs]

Hockney is at least a british artist as much as he is an LA artist, so I don't know if he counts.

Hockney has lived out here for thirty years and done most of his important work here as well. Of course he counts! Would you consider Irving Berlin to be a Russian songwriter?

I wouldn't consider John Cage or Susan Sontag to be Los Angeles artists just because they were born here.

[sopas ej]

That Americans on average work more does not imply that they are somehow oppressed. Americans also earn more money, on average.

It doesn't? Again, I wasn't talking about money, but lifestyle. Maybe I'm not as materialstic as others, but to me, what's the point of earning six figures when it means having to eat at your desk during your lunch hour (if you even get a full hour for lunch) and having to carry your cell phone so the company can call you while on your 2-week vacation? Not being able to spend more quality time with your loved ones because you spend more time with your co-workers?


I've lived in the UK, and travelled extensively throughout Europe. While there are good points to both sides of the Atlantic, I'm not very sure that I could achieve there what I have achieved here. And I don't even work long hours!

Most Americans aren't as lucky as you. Out of curiosity, what's your definition of long hours?


Generally, America has a far more dynamic economy, and a society that allows ambitious and educated newcomers to prosper tremendously (for example the immigrant founders of innumerable IT and other companies).

I will take that all of that with a grain of salt; somehow I don't think the US has the monopoly on immigrant success stories.


Add to that the sheer material abundance of our middle and upper-middle classes, with their often massive houses, private swimming pools, huge amounts of space, expensive cars, prices that are well below Europe's and salaries that are as high or higher...

Again, I'm not materialistic. I don't place importance on stuff like that. And I thought the American middle-class was shrinking... and being "forced" to move to exurbs because it's cheaper out there, just so they can have those massive houses and private swimming pools and expensive cars that come with financed monthly payments, because they have it in their minds that those things are important. And again, I don't think it's worth it to have those things if you can't even enjoy them because you're mostly at work anyway, let alone not spending more quality time with loved ones.


Whatever... there's no need for a EU vs US thread. But understand that the country you live in, despite the fashion for hating or at best condescending to it now in Europe, is not quite as backward as you think.

Again, what's wrong with addressing these issues and asking for conditions that are better than what we already have? I wasn't being condescending towards the US, I was questioning why we don't have what other countries do have. I'm just making observations. My opinion is my opinion, and I guess my priorities and what I value, are different than some or most people in the US.


But there is also no need to actively agree with the condescension and facile stereotypes toward your own culture and country coming from some Europeans. It's frankly pathetic.

My opinions were formed by my own observations, not by any "condescension" or "stereotypes" made by Europeans. I too have traveled throughout Europe, visiting with my friends and just going for the hell of it. I observed that people there don't rush back to their jobs because their 45-minute lunch is over, I observed that people don't have to take out a 2nd mortgage to finance their child's education... etc. etc.

Again, I guess my idea of what constitutes a good daily lifestyle differs from others, including yours.

[bricky]

I will take that all of that with a grain of salt; somehow I don't think the US has the monopoly on immigrant success stories.



Again, I'm not materialistic. I don't place importance on stuff like that. And I thought the American middle-class was shrinking... and being "forced" to move to exurbs because it's cheaper out there, just so they can have those massive houses and private swimming pools and expensive cars that come with financed monthly payments, because they have it in their minds that those things are important. And again, I don't think it's worth it to have those things if you can't even enjoy them because you're mostly at work anyway, let alone not spending more quality time with loved ones.

Find me European companies of the caliber of Google, Yahoo, Cisco, ebay, Sun Microsystems, Intel, and Amazon, founded by immigrants? The wholesale technological transformation of the world over the past 25 years has been driven in no small part by immigrants to the USA.

And actually, I agree with you about the lifestyle thing. I have my own business, and "hang out" there for about 40-50 hours a week, keeping an eye on things, but I don't work particularly hard while I'm there. Trick I picked up from my immigrant dad, who's been doing something like this very successfully for the past 20 years. But prefering lifestyle over material progress is an opinion. Not a fact. Lots of people in America are very materialistic, and are willing to work long hours to get the "toys" that they want. That's their perrogative, and we have no right to say they are wrong, anymore than they have a right to call Europeans lazy socialists.

[sopas ej]

Find me European companies of the caliber of Google, Yahoo, Cisco, ebay, Sun Microsystems, Intel, and Amazon, founded by immigrants?

I don't have time to do that, I'm at work right now.


The wholesale technological transformation of the world over the past 25 years has been driven in no small part by immigrants to the USA.

Hmm... I'll take this statement with another grain of salt.


But prefering lifestyle over material progress is an opinion. Not a fact.

It's also a choice.


Lots of people in America are very materialistic, and are willing to work long hours to get the "toys" that they want. That's their perrogative, and we have no right to say they are wrong, anymore than they have a right to call Europeans lazy socialists.

I know that's their prerogative, I wasn't at all saying that it's wrong; throughout my last post I just kept saying that that way of thinking isn't mine. And, it's my opinion, that it's this materialism and the "willingness" to work long hours just for the "toys" that's keeping things status quo in the US in terms of workers' rights and benefits.

Lots of people in the US are very materialistic, true. And having grown up in the Los Angeles area, this has been my own observation, that immigrants from certain countries are PARTICULARLY materialistic, most notably certain developing nations.

[bricky]

I don't have time to do that, I'm at work right now.

Haha the lifestyle guru! Take all the time you want, because it's an impossible task!

And yes, immigrants from some developing countries (it would be fun to guess which ones you mean) are particularly materialistic. Because those immigrants often grew up with nothing, and now find themselves like kids in a candy store.

My dad's attitude is that anyone who makes nothing of their lives in America is lazy, stupid, or both. He came with nothing, from a desperately poor country, and now he has a lot. It's a common attitude among immigrants, and has a grain of truth in it. Literally anyone who applies themselves just enough to get into and through even some no-name podunk 4 year college pretty much has a ticket to the middle class.