What happened?<\/p>\n
Young artists emerging from Southern California\u2019s bountiful art schools decided, en masse, to stick around. New York? Why move there?<\/p>\n
The usual talent-drain to the East slowed, partly thanks to the extraordinarily gifted Mike Kelley<\/a>. Artists always know who among their cohorts is the best, and even as a student at Cal Arts, where Kelley graduated in 1978, he held that influential position. After graduation he decided to buck the usual trend and stay in town. People noticed.<\/p>\n I was nonplussed at a 1992 symposium in Vienna when a hall filled with international art world denizens went absolutely wild, cheering and stomping when Kelley was introduced on a panel. The greeting was worthy of a rock star. I had never seen anything like it.<\/p>\n The art world had internationalized, fueled significantly by the \u201880s emergence of a heady art market \u2014 a bubble that would soon burst, then revive \u2014 and by the brilliant return to prominence of German artists. Kelley was hardly the only American to benefit, but he was the first L.A. artist whose developing reputation \u2014 locally, then nationally, finally internationally \u2014 was fully coincident with the developing maturity and resonance of his extraordinary art.<\/p>\n Second: the Getty. I know of no other city whose rise to international stature can trace its launch to an exact day \u2014 in this case, Feb. 28, 1982.<\/p>\n That\u2019s when news broke of the $1.2 billion bequest by the late American oil billionaire J. Paul Getty, then regularly cited as the world\u2019s richest person, to his peculiar vanity museum in Pacific Palisades. After six years of contentious legal wrangling, earlier estimates of the possible windfall had nearly doubled. A small, second-rate art outpost overlooking the Pacific was suddenly the most richly endowed museum on Earth.<\/p>\n Today the endowment number is more than $9.45 billion. Culturally, the inevitable expenditure of vast sums of money isn\u2019t exactly what made the difference. Instead, the simple fact of massive media fascination with an art-related subject in Los Angeles did the trick.<\/p>\n Sure, international press had been fixated on the city for decades, but the focus was on Hollywood pop culture \u2014 movies, television, music. As 1982 unfolded, one could almost feel every news camera around the globe turn to L.A. For the first time, art culture, not popular culture, became a target of enduring media attention.<\/p>\n That had never happened before, except for a specific event like the 1922 arrival of Gainsborough\u2019s famed \u201cThe Blue Boy,\u201d as the world\u2019s then-most expensive painting headed to Henry E. Huntington\u2019s San Marino mansion, or the near-demolition in 1959 of Sabato Rodia\u2019s incomparable Watts Towers<\/a>. Since the Getty news, though, international art attention has been fixed.<\/p>\n Sabato Rodia began building the Watts Towers more than 100 years ago.<\/p>\n (Carolyn Cole \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n The third transformation: A path-breaking art institution opened. Artists got an idea for a Museum of Contemporary Art off the ground in 1979, goading the wealthy and influential powers that be into action. MOCA had its public debut in 1983. It was not without its tribulations \u2014 either at the start or throughout its 46-year roller-coaster history. But an audacious museum expressly designed to present, collect, preserve and interpret the art of our time, as its mission statement declares, set a standard that has been emulated across the country and abroad.<\/p>\n From the adaptive reuse of an industrial-era building in Little Tokyo for the \u201cTemporary Contemporary\u201d \u2014 which became an instant template for countless other new museums, from Sydney\u2019s MCA Australia to London\u2019s Tate Modern \u2014 to a slew of landmark exhibitions unafraid to tackle art\u2019s tangled contemporary history internationally since the end of World War II, MOCA emerged as the most talked about institution of its type in America. In 1992, the landmark \u201cHelter Skelter: L.A. Art in the \u201890s<\/a>\u201d looked forward, not backward, inventing history. The city\u2019s vivifying artistic production was put on the map.<\/p>\n Artists, mass media, infrastructure \u2014 the thriving triad was extraordinary to watch erupt.<\/p>\n Art is a mysterious experience, with an object or event as its catalyst. And because art is experience, it\u2019s essential to be willing to change your mind as your experience unfolds. Art criticism is about writing, a fundamental way to process that mystery, aiming to discover something at least temporarily intelligible. The job of writing for a newspaper is to find ways to invite a reader, whether specialist or generalist, into that process of discovery \u2014 all while knowing that somewhere, out in the vast invisible readership, is someone who knows a hell of a lot more about the subject than I do.<\/p>\n Every few years now there seems to be a flurry of worry about a \u201ccrisis in criticism.\u201d I think that fuss misses the mark, however. The crisis is in publishing, not criticism.<\/p>\n There are different kinds of art criticism \u2014 theoretical, and academic, two that turn up in different kinds of scholarly journals; trade, sponsored in commercially supported magazines; and journalistic, embedded in press reporting on everyday life. Charles Baudelaire, 19th century poet, was journalistic criticism\u2019s first great practitioner. His classic \u201cThe Painter of Modern Life,\u201d advocating for upending art\u2019s sclerotic monotony, appeared in three profoundly influential installments of the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro.<\/p>\n Trade and journalistic art criticism are both rooted in mass media, now threatened as their platforms shrink and disappear. The Times has had a staff art critic for a hundred years, ever since the 1926 appointment of British immigrant and painter Arthur Millier, who wrote in these pages for 32 years. Modern American mass media exploded in the 1920s \u2014 notably, along with Hollywood. The crisis now in publishing (and Hollywood) is a function of the previous generation\u2019s chaotic digital revolution, which fractured media\u2019s old \u201cmass.\u201d<\/p>\n For criticism, streaming snippets are now carried along in a fragmentary rush of social media, bumping aside analog writing and reading. All too often, thumbs up-or-down stand in its place. Where that\u2019s all headed is anybody\u2019s guess, just as it was half a millennium ago, early in the Gutenberg revolution of print.<\/p>\n L.A.\u2019s transformation might be most apparent in two events planned for next year, when the Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the new Lucas Museum of Narrative Art both open. Most attention so far has focused on their unusual architecture, sure to draw crowds. But I\u2019m on the record<\/a> as skeptical of their planned programs. LACMA intends curator-heavy thematic installations of its permanent collections, although it doesn\u2019t have the depth to present more than Art History Lite. Meanwhile, the Lucas<\/a> idea confuses art culture with popular culture, bizarrely touting illustrated storytelling as \u201cthe peoples\u2019 art.\u201d As one of those people, I object.<\/p>\n Still, these tourist-driven projects add up to the L.A. debut for upward of $2 billion in new art museum infrastructure. Astonishing.<\/p>\n When I started in 1980, I wouldn\u2019t have thought such a thing possible. But they rise atop an exhilarating foundation. I look forward to seeing them.<\/p>\n And here\u2019s hoping we\u2019ll read some discerning criticism on the subject as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Habits are hard to break. I quit smoking 40 years ago \u2014 on April 23, 1986 (not that…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":417121,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[1037,95982,8067,1582,276,115,195405,195401,2961,195406,224,2444,5337,195402,11365,195403,6985,195404,103,1628],"class_list":{"0":"post-417120","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-art","9":"tag-art-criticism","10":"tag-artist","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-california","13":"tag-crisis","14":"tag-horizontal-city","15":"tag-l-a-negative","16":"tag-la","17":"tag-landmark-exhibition","18":"tag-los-angeles","19":"tag-los-angeles-times","20":"tag-losangeles","21":"tag-mass-medium","22":"tag-museum","23":"tag-mysterious-experience","24":"tag-new-york-times","25":"tag-specific-event","26":"tag-world","27":"tag-year"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115644178083121738","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417120","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=417120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/417120\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/417121"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=417120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=417120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=417120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}} <\/p>\n