Los Angeles

Disney Hall

Ring In The New: The peaks and swells of Frank Gehry’s billowing Disney Hall, the newest and grandest concert venue in Los Angeles.

With the art and design worlds (or world, if you think they’re just two sides of the same planet) decentralizing all around us, moving — no, spreading — everywhere from China to South America to the World Wide Web, we search furiously for an au courant “capital,” the latest best place to go to see the finest and newest and most art and design. Short as we are of time and energy and attention span, we attempt to one-stop shop our eternal hunt for the ne plus ultra in vision and talent and craft.

But we simply can’t spend our off hours, or on hours, surfing endless Websites. Doing that, we’re looking at reproductions of reproductions, flat-screen renditions of objects and images that require air around them, that need to be well lit, encountered in their original size, touched and sat in. You can say that the Internet is the new hub for art and design, and it is.   But if you say it’s the new capital for food as well, the proof is not in the pixel, but in the pudding.

That makes Los Angeles, by more than default, an international art capital. The art capital of the world? The design capital? London calling. Hallo Berlin. Tokyo on my mind. Ciao Milano. Paris en retour. Oh yeah, New York. Our little upstart village, regarded only yesterday as the far-flung outpost of one charming (and lucrative) but suspect art form – one better suited to the invention of personalities than of masterpieces – needs to do a little more maturing before it can go up against these Bastions Of High Art, doesn’t it.

You know the answer. Actually, it’s two answers: Yes But and No But. Yes, we need to do some more maturing. But there has been such a devolution of what might be considered artistic “maturity” in places like New York and London that the natural youth of the Los Angeles scene is now, for better or worse, considered its own form of wisdom. And as the oldest capitals are now among the youngest (look at Beijing) and the youngest among the oldest (don’t forget, New York is barely more than a century older than L.A.), the concepts of “maturity” and “youth” have become infinitely complicated, or at least obscured. (Gertrude Stein said that “America is the oldest country in the world because it has been new the longest.”) No, Los Angeles does not need to do any more maturing; it’s been growing up, quickly and steadily, over the last half-century. It’s a real city now, not just a collection of metastasizing suburbs, and its moment has arrived. But what does Los Angeles really have to show for that maturation? It has culture, but does it have a culture of culture, a sense of artistic place that says to the world, “come here and see and acquire great things – great things that sit still while you look at and touch them?”

Hollywood Bowl

Ring In The Old: The crest of the Hollywood Bowl, in all its Art-Deco, LA-noir splendor.

Not like New York.Not like London. Not like Berlin. But we do, finally, have that culture of culture, our own form of it. We not only have enviable museums – more and more of them every year, it seems – but we have places to discuss what’s in them, in print, on line, and face to face. True, we’re more dependent on blogs than on cafes, but we now have both in abundance. And the intellectual foundation of Los Angeles art and culture remains the schools, our broad and brilliant archipelago of universities and art academies stretching from Big Sur to the border that have provided artists education, employment, and community ever since the invention of the GI Bill.

It’s no coincidence that the end of World War II brought about the birth of the art-and-design scene in southern California. Between the education and the industry, the boom and the bloom, Los Angeles and environs became the fastest growing corner of America in every sense of the word, art not least. Recent exhibitions and publications have documented that vitality, revealing how vast, how distinctive, and how influential it was. From the Eameses to John McLaughlin, from Ed Ruscha to Case Study Houses, from the Watts Renaissance to Los Four, from Finish/Fetish to Frank Gehry, from Art Center to the Women’s Building, this neck of the woods has brimmed with unique and influential talent for as long as most of us have been alive. New York got the glory; San Francisco got the glamour; we got the goods.

Which is to say, yes, Los Angeles is inarguably and emphatically an international capital of art and design. This is indeed Los Angeles’ “moment.” But it took sixty years for this moment to arrive, and it is not going to prove fleeting. Right now, with recession looming, such exuberance does not seem terribly rational. But with the worldwide appetite for art and design and, not coincidentally, all things LA unquenched (and with prices in dollars making the whole damned country the world’s thrift store), our short-term prognosis is almost as good as our long-term. Beyond the economic realities, however, Los Angeles has established itself – again, for better or worse – as not just an urban megalopolis, but a model urban megalopolis, the kind of place that Singapore and Sydney keep an eye on for hints and warnings, problems and solutions, cautionary models and breakthrough ideas. We have them all in abundance – not least in the art and design brimming all around you in this eternally fascinating, endlessly entertaining town.

Photography: Ted VanCleave