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

[Quixote]

Bohemian Today, High-Rent Tomorrow
Creative types are essential to urban and regional economic growth. Here's why—and the cities artists should flock to now
by Maya Roney

Want to know where a great place to invest in real estate will be five or 10 years from now? Look at where artists are living now.

Sociologists and policymakers have long been touting art and culture as the cure-all to economically depressed neighborhoods, cities, and regions. The reason? It has been proven that artists—defined as self-employed visual artists, actors, musicians, writers, etc.—can stimulate local economies in a number of ways.

Artists are often an early sign of neighborhood gentrification. "Artists are the advance guard of what's hip and cool," says Bert Sperling, founder and president of Portland (Ore.)-based Sperling's Best Places and compiler of BusinessWeek.com's list of the Best Places for Artists in America.

Creativity Leads to Growth
Artists, because of their typically lower incomes, usually need to seek out less expensive, developing neighborhoods where they can afford the rent. But because of their creativity they are able to fix up these areas, eventually attracting hip boutiques, galleries, and restaurants. Not all artists are starving. While some are able to achieve success writing, acting, painting, or dancing, others get tired of scraping by as waiters or bartenders and sometimes apply their abilities in more entrepreneurial ways.

Anne Markusen, an economist and professor at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs and a leading researcher on the effects of the arts on regional economics, once profiled an abstract painter whose work is now displayed on ceilings and in MRI machines in hospitals across the country. In Markusen's research, artists have also been found to stimulate innovation on the part of their suppliers. A painter may need a certain type of frame that is not manufactured, forcing the frame maker to create a new design that happens to also work well for other artists.

But Markusen also maintains that artists bring more than culture to a community. "Businesses don't often understand the extent to which art affects them," Markusen says. "[Artists] are just as important as science and technology companies."

Nonarts businesses also use artist contractors to improve product design, help with marketing, or even use dramatic theory to solve employee relationship issues. Being a cultural center also helps local businesses attract employees who want to be able to regularly go to the ballet or the theater, hear authors read from their latest books, or attend art gallery openings.

Follow the Money
Due to the individual nature and economics of their work, artists are also some of the most itinerant professionals out there. When relocating, they often look for cities and towns that already have high concentrations of artists and a young, racially and ethnically diverse population. The presence of a nurturing art community in the form of art societies and centers is also essential, especially to young artists.

A low cost of living is important, but many artists make financial sacrifices to live near an art-rich urban center or live in a cheaper neighborhood. Few struggling artists can afford to live in neighborhoods like New York's SoHo and Greenwich Village, or even Williamsburg, which once were artistic havens before attracting wealthier residents. Now you are more likely to find New York-based artists in the Bronx, Brooklyn, or even Philadelphia.

In addition to the presence of like-minded individuals, proximity to wealth is also important. The fact of the matter is that artists can seldom earn a living, let alone become rich, selling to other artists. They need wealthy benefactors to buy their paintings or support their local symphony, which explains why each of the places in the U.S. that we found to be the best for artists are in or located near centers of wealth. Los Angeles, No. 1 on our list, is most commonly associated with the film industry. While the city provides great opportunities for actors and directors, there are equally rich prospects for musicians, artists, writers, and dancers. Of course, the majority of these people can't afford to live in Beverly Hills—at least not until they get their big break—and instead opt for more affordable digs in areas like Echo Park.

Where to Go Now
BusinessWeek.com and Sperling's Best Places came up with a list of the best places for artists in the U.S. by identifying the metro areas that have the highest concentrations of artistic establishments. We also looked at the percentage of young people age 25 to 34, population diversity, and concentration of museums, philharmonic orchestras, dance companies, theater troupes, library resources, and college arts programs. Lower cost of living played a part in the selection of some cities but had to be overlooked in others because of other very favorable factors.

Some of the top ten are traditional art "super cities"—one of the reasons Los Angeles leads the list is because it has 56 artistic establishments for every 100,000 people, a diversity index of 84.2, and an arts and culture index of 100 (on a scale of 1 to 100). New York City and San Francisco are also in the top ten. Other places are midsize cities, like hippie havens Santa Fe and Boulder, and country-music nucleus Nashville. Smaller, less-obvious additions include Carson City, Nev., which ranks third for its high concentration of art establishments, and the city of Kingston in New York's Hudson River Valley.

Ready to quit your day job and make art your profession? These metro areas are good places to start. And with all the economic benefits you'll be providing, they should welcome you with open arms.

Click here to see the Best Places for Artists in America.
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/...226_149427.htm
Roney is Real Estate writer for BusinessWeek.com.

[dragonsky]

Hindus show their Holi colors
The religious festival celebrates the coming of spring, the triumph of good over evil and the playful antics of the god Krishna.
By Tami Abdollah, Times Staff Writer
March 4, 2007




Six-year-old Ishika Muchhal trembles with excitement as she hides near the park's picnic benches, her face smeared with powdered paints: green, pink and red, with a splotch of blue on her forehead and a hint of yellow on her nose.

Earlier, she had been hit directly between the shoulders by a boy she calls "an enemy of mine." There's even a yellow and green drenched spot as proof.

She tells her tale gleefully, reenacting the scene with a smile and a hint of the dramatic. "I got sprayed in the back and I couldn't even see the person spraying me," Ishika says. "Now he doesn't know where I am."

Meanwhile, giggles and shrieks are heard as toddlers, teenagers and adults rub paint onto one another's faces, arms and clothes. Children run, spraying water guns, drenching one another and making the colors run.

About 150 people from Southern California gathered Saturday at Arcadia Park to celebrate Holi — the Pan-Indian "festival of colors," a holiday celebrated by Hindus, Sikhs and some Muslims that rejoices in the coming of spring and the triumph of good over evil. It is considered a major Hindu festival.

The celebration was organized by the Hindu Temple and Heritage Foundation of Pasadena.

Manish Khemani, 24, of Northridge came to the United States from Mumbai, India, about two years ago, and this was his first Holi celebration in his new home. "It's different," he said, "Holi is much more intense in India — more water, more colors, water balloons."

But Khemani said he was pleasantly surprised and felt a little nostalgic.

The holiday falls on the full moon in the Hindu month of Falgun, usually around March. Traditionally celebrated over five days, it has been condensed in modern times to about two days. At night a bonfire is held, and people usually "play colors" the next day.

According to Hindu stories, the holiday commemorates the death of Holika, who represents evil, and the saving of her nephew Prehlad, who represents good.

One version of the tale tells of Prehlad's father, Hiranyakshipu, an evil man who wanted Prehlad to worship him, not the Hindu god Vishnu. After many attempts to change his son's mind, Hiranyakshipu decides to burn him to death, and his aunt, Holika, is to help. In the end, Holika is burned to death and Prehlad is saved.

Another story is about the Hindu god Krishna, who is said to have lived 5,000 years ago. He enjoyed dalliances with the milkmaids, especially Radha. On Holi, Krishna asked his mother why his skin was darker than Radha's. His mother told him to rub paint on her. She retaliated and eventually, all the villagers joined in. Since then, Holi has also been celebrated with colors.

A holiday known for merriment and boisterousness, Holi is a special day, especially in India, because social restrictions and caste norms are relaxed.

"One of the things that Holi lets you do is let loose," said Vinay Lal, a professor of history and Asian American studies at UCLA. "Holi is something anybody can take part in because you do not need anything, just water and color. You can go to the home of an upper-caste person and throw water at them and rub color on them. But the following day, everything reverts back to normal."

In the United States, celebrants said it was a good day to take time off from hectic days of work, relax with friends and family and to renew friendships.

"If you are on bad terms with someone, you don't need to speak words to them," said Sonia Anand, 35, of Arcadia. "Sometimes the words hold you back, and all you need is some color and a hug."

[citywatch]

NY Times, March 6, 2007

Big Corporate Gift Expected for Los Angeles County Museum of Art

By EDWARD WYATT

LOS ANGELES, March 5 — The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is expected to announce a corporate gift of more than $10 million on Tuesday that it will use to finance a building project, a person close to the museum said yesterday. The gift, for new exhibition space, arrives as the museum pursues a sweeping renovation of its 20-acre campus, and its director, Michael Govan, aggressively seeks to step up fund-raising and transform the museum’s somewhat dowdy image.

The museum, on Wilshire Boulevard in Hancock Park, next to La Brea Tar Pits, has been working since 2004 with the Italian architect Renzo Piano on the renovation plan. The first phase includes the construction of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, which is already under way and is being paid for by a $60 million gift from the philanthropist Eli Broad. That building, along with a new grand entrance pavilion and an underground parking garage, is expected to open in about a year.

Allison Agsten, a spokeswoman for the museum, declined to comment on any potential announcement. But the person close to the museum, who declined to be identified because the institution had not authorized disclosure of the gift, said the donation was expected to be in the tens of millions of dollars. That the gift is from a corporation is likely to stir some excitement in the art world, given recent cutbacks in companies’ contributions to nonprofit institutions.

As part of his attempt to raise the museum’s profile Mr. Govan has helped recruit several new members of its board, including some business figures. Among those named to the board in recent months are Terry Semel, the chief executive of Yahoo; David Bohnett, a technology entrepreneur and venture capitalist; Chris DeWolfe, the co-founder and chief executive of MySpace.com; and Anthony N. Pritzker, a co-founder of the Pritzker Group, an investment firm, and part of the family that founded the Hyatt hotel chain.

The museum has been trying to raise money to finance the second and third phases of its rebuilding plan, which are to include a renovation of a building that formerly housed the May Company department store on the western edge of the museum campus. That building will include exhibition space and a children’s gallery, a restaurant, bookstore and administrative offices.

In an interview last week Mr. Govan said the later phases of the project would include “a new exhibition facility” on the west side of the campus, near the May Company building. Last month he described plans for a giant moving sculpture at the museum’s new entrance: a 161-foot-tall sculpture by Jeff Koons that is essentially a working 1940s locomotive suspended from a crane.

[LosAngelesBeauty]

^ Hmmm, I wonder if the "new exhibition facility" on the western edge of the campus is NORTH of the May Co. building ON FAIRFAX? That would be fantastic!

AND! From what I was told by someone who works at LACMA awhile ago, the Ahmanson wing which currently exhibits most of the museums permanent collection (and the famed Klimt exhibit), will be used for administrative purposes. This is good news since that building is not only outdated, but extremely unimpressive.

We need to raise the standard here in LA to newer heights. After visiting the Met in NYC, your views on what is "acceptable" changes for a museum of LACMA's caliber. Although we're definitely not at the Met's level when it comes to classical collections, we should present ourselves in the utmost architecturally sophisticated way to "fool" people that it is better than what it really is. I mean, when you go to the Getty, the museum itself becomes the art and elevates the position of the museum as a result.

[LosAngelesBeauty]

I wonder if Spielberg will ever donate at least part of his collection to LA-based museums, esp. LACMA. He seems to have some kind of loyalty for the East Coast. Hopefully many of his paintings will end up at LACMA in a "Steven Spielberg Wing" someday.


---------



Stolen painting found in Spielberg's collection
The director, a major collector of works by Rockwell, contacts the FBI. An agent calls the movie mogul an 'unknowing victim.'
By Greg Krikorian and Ashraf Khalil
Times Staff Writers

March 3, 2007

A Norman Rockwell painting stolen from a Missouri gallery 34 years ago was recovered and authenticated Friday in the collection of movie mogul Steven Spielberg.

Spielberg's spokesman, Marvin Levy, said the director's staff contacted the FBI several weeks ago after seeing a bulletin from the agency's Art Crime Team seeking clues about the theft of the "Russian Schoolroom" oil painting.

"The second anybody said, 'I think we have that painting,' [our] office got a hold of the FBI," Levy said.

Special Agent Chris Calarco of the FBI's Art Crime Team and Jessica Todd Smith, curator of American art for the Huntington Library, inspected the painting Friday afternoon at Spielberg's offices on the Universal Studios lot. The filmmaker was not present.

"He's an absolutely unknowing victim in this," Calarco said of Spielberg.

Calarco declined to speculate on the painting's value, but two sources close to the investigation said it is worth between $700,000 and $1 million.

The painting, depicting schoolchildren in a classroom looking at a bust of Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, was stolen during an exhibit at a small art gallery in Clayton, Mo., in June 1973.

According to the FBI, its whereabouts were unknown until 1988, when it was sold at an auction in New Orleans for about $70,000.

Spielberg bought the painting from an art dealer in 1989 for an undisclosed sum, Calarco said.

The director is a high-profile Rockwell collector who helped found the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass.

As of last fall, he was listed as the museum's third vice president and a member of its board of trustees.

"He's certainly one of the collectors of Rockwell," said Levy, who wasn't sure how many Rockwell paintings Spielberg owns or where he kept "Russian Schoolroom." "We have a few in our office on the Universal lot."

The probe into the original theft lay dormant until 2004, when art crime investigators determined that the painting had been advertised for sale at a Norman Rockwell exhibit in New York in 1989.

Agents in the New York and Los Angeles field offices began putting out bulletins in art circles and tracking down known Rockwell collectors.

"We were basically just about to figure it out when the Spielberg people made the connection," Calarco said.

Linda Pero, curator of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., said: "I think it's really wonderful."

The FBI made the Spielberg link public late Friday, after an earlier notice — published in today's Calendar section — that the painting may have been found.

For now, the painting will remain in Spielberg's possession.

"I just advised them to hold on to it. It's safe there," Calarco said.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
greg.krikorian@latimes.com ashraf.khalil@latimes.com

[LA/OC/London]

Seriously - stop donating cool art to New York Museums and galleries- LACMA is a great institution and could use some love

That said, I think LACMA is in a nice transition phase right now and its collection will only continue to improve with time. Hopefully some of our local collectors will donate more of their pieces to local galleries.

[LosAngelesBeauty]

Originally Posted by citywatch

NY Times, March 6, 2007

Big Corporate Gift Expected for Los Angeles County Museum of Art

By EDWARD WYATT

LOS ANGELES, March 5 — The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is expected to announce a corporate gift of more than $10 million on Tuesday that it will use to finance a building project, a person close to the museum said yesterday. The gift, for new exhibition space, arrives as the museum pursues a sweeping renovation of its 20-acre campus, and its director, Michael Govan, aggressively seeks to step up fund-raising and transform the museum’s somewhat dowdy image.

The museum, on Wilshire Boulevard in Hancock Park, next to La Brea Tar Pits, has been working since 2004 with the Italian architect Renzo Piano on the renovation plan. The first phase includes the construction of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, which is already under way and is being paid for by a $60 million gift from the philanthropist Eli Broad. That building, along with a new grand entrance pavilion and an underground parking garage, is expected to open in about a year.

Allison Agsten, a spokeswoman for the museum, declined to comment on any potential announcement. But the person close to the museum, who declined to be identified because the institution had not authorized disclosure of the gift, said the donation was expected to be in the tens of millions of dollars. That the gift is from a corporation is likely to stir some excitement in the art world, given recent cutbacks in companies’ contributions to nonprofit institutions.

As part of his attempt to raise the museum’s profile Mr. Govan has helped recruit several new members of its board, including some business figures. Among those named to the board in recent months are Terry Semel, the chief executive of Yahoo; David Bohnett, a technology entrepreneur and venture capitalist; Chris DeWolfe, the co-founder and chief executive of MySpace.com; and Anthony N. Pritzker, a co-founder of the Pritzker Group, an investment firm, and part of the family that founded the Hyatt hotel chain.

The museum has been trying to raise money to finance the second and third phases of its rebuilding plan, which are to include a renovation of a building that formerly housed the May Company department store on the western edge of the museum campus. That building will include exhibition space and a children’s gallery, a restaurant, bookstore and administrative offices.

In an interview last week Mr. Govan said the later phases of the project would include “a new exhibition facility” on the west side of the campus, near the May Company building. Last month he described plans for a giant moving sculpture at the museum’s new entrance: a 161-foot-tall sculpture by Jeff Koons that is essentially a working 1940s locomotive suspended from a crane.

BP Gives $25 Million to L.A. Art Museum for Expansion (Update1)

By Michael Janofsky

March 6 (Bloomberg) -- Oil company BP Plc is donating $25 million to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to help complete the first phase of an expansion project.

Museum officials say the gift is the largest single corporate donation to an arts institution in Southern California.

The money from BP, which bought Los Angeles-based Arco in 2000, will be used to build a solar-paneled entry -- the BP Grand Entrance -- connecting the new Broad Contemporary Art Museum to LACMA's existing building, the museum said.

The new building, which is being designed by the Italian architect Renzo Piano and is scheduled to open in 11 months, will house the art collection of Eli Broad, a billionaire businessman and one of Los Angeles's leading philanthropists and collectors of modern and contemporary art.

Broad, who built his fortune through a home-building company and insurance group, donated $60 million to LACMA in 2004 -- $50 million for the new building and $10 million for acquisitions.

The BP donation brings the total in private donations for the current building campaign to almost $200 million, Michael Govan, LACMA's director and chief executive officer, said at a news conference.

Decline in Corporate Gifts

The gift from London-based BP occurs at a time when most of the larger donations to museums come from wealthy private collectors or foundations rather than corporations, which have scaled back donations for the arts. Among the largest gifts in recent years, the Dallas Museum of Art received three private collections in 2005 valued at the time at $400 million. The same year, David Rockefeller pledged $100 million to the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Robert Malone, president of BP America, said his company has donated to the arts consistently in recent years, even with fluctuations in energy prices. The gifts include $125 million in arts donations throughout California over the past 10 years.

``We've given when oil prices are high and when oil prices have been low,'' he said in an interview. ``When your income stream is better, it makes the bigger grants easier, but we've made them in bad times and good.''

Even so, ``there is a lot of concern among arts organizations that corporate giving has really gone down,'' said Ian Wilhelm, a reporter for the Chronicle of Philanthropy, adding that ``the size of the BP gift is significant.''

Nancy Daly Riordan, the LACMA board chairwoman, said in a statement that BP's gift ``demonstrates a tangible commitment to the Los Angeles community and will have a significant impact on the future of LACMA.''

To contact the reporter on this story: Michael Janofsky in Los Angeles at mjanofsky@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: March 6, 2007 15:53 EST

[citywatch]

BP Gives $25 Million to LACMA

The BP donation will go toward a solar entrance that the British oil firm hopes will invoke energy innovation.

By Mike Boehm, Times Staff Writer

A $25-million donation from BP has capped phase one of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's three-part expansion and renovation campaign. Solar panels atop a new entry pavilion named for the British oil company will signal BP's wish to be seen as an environmental innovator. LACMA plans to announce today that the glass-encased structure will be called the BP Grand Entrance. It's under construction along with the adjacent Broad Contemporary Art Museum, with both additions to the museum's Wilshire Boulevard campus projected to open next February. The entrance is a key point in architect Renzo Piano's plan to unify LACMA's sprawling, often confusing layout of buildings.

Bob Malone, chairman and president of Houston-based BP America, said the gift betokens a commitment to the arts and a steady philanthropic role in Los Angeles. Before it was merged into BP in 2000, L.A.-based Arco was hailed locally for its philanthropy, including a $10-million donation in 1997 for the Walt Disney Concert Hall. To allay concerns over the merger, BP promised to donate at least $100 million to California charities within 10 years. Malone said that BP's gift to LACMA is free-standing and won't be counted toward the $100 million. He said the same goes for a recently announced $500-million, 10-year research grant to UC Berkeley and other institutions to develop alternative, cleaner-burning fuels.

Since 2002, BP has agreed to more than $125 million in legal settlements with state and regional agencies over pollution problems. BP reported profits of $22 billion in 2006 and a record $22.3 billion in 2005. The $25 million for LACMA matches Walt Disney Co.'s 1997 gift for Disney Hall as the biggest corporate donation to the arts in Los Angeles' recent memory. It comes as the arts recede as a cause for big corporations. A survey by the Conference Board, a nonprofit business research organization, showed a 6.1% drop in average arts giving from 2002 to 2005, according to figures from the Americans for the Arts advocacy group.

Malone said he became a LACMA fan while president of BP's L.A.-based Western regional office from 2000 to 2002, before his four-year transfer to London. "There's a huge need not to lose the arts" as a focus for corporate philanthropy, said Malone, who announced a three-year, $3.4-million BP grant to the Chicago Symphony in November. He said that Eli Broad, who gave $60 million to LACMA's campaign with his wife, Edythe, was a rainmaker for the donation. More than a year ago, BP first gave $1 million to LACMA's endowment campaign. Malone said he subsequently called Broad after being put in charge of U.S. operations, asking him to recommend causes in L.A. "where we could make a difference."

In courting the gift from BP's top executives in London, LACMA Director Michael Govan said he emphasized "access and energy" as hallmarks of the new museum entrance that would be a symbolic fit for a gasoline seller (BP's brands in California are Arco and Thrifty) interested in making art more available to the public. It was BP's idea to make the energy connection literal. The solar panels will help feed the museum's power needs.

Last year, LACMA announced it was going to name the new entrance the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Grand Entrance Pavilion, in honor of their $25-million gift early in the campaign. Lynda Resnick, a vice chair on LACMA's board said they were happy to step aside to clear the pipeline for BP's millions; they'll instead apply their donation — and more — to an as-yet-unannounced, "really exciting" new feature in the second phase.

Without giving details, Govan, hired just over a year ago, said he had "expanded the ambition" of LACMA's pay-as-you-go overhaul and expansion. The first-phase goal was $150 million when announced two years ago; BP's gift closes out first-phase fundraising at $191 million. Govan said that "although we exceeded our goal," factors such as financing and rising construction costs do not mean that LACMA has a $41-million windfall.

For BP, environmentally tinged largess comes after several years of environmental mishaps in California. In 2002, BP paid the state $45.8 million to settle a suit over pollution from leaking gasoline storage tanks. Later, air quality regulators sued over leakage of smog-forming chemicals at BP's Carson refinery. BP settled for $81 million. "Yes, we've had some incidents ... we deeply regret, and we're in action to get those right," Malone said. Topping a structure like the LACMA entrance with solar panels sends a message that BP and California are serious about setting a green example, he said.

And putting an oil company's name on LACMA's doorway brings an unusually high potential for controversy, Govan acknowledged. "What was convincing to me was their commitment to sustainable energy.... We won't make the transition without the help and cooperation of these major corporations."

[dragonsky]

Art of the new
How a previously industrial area in Culver City morphed into the latest gallery hotspot.



By Dean Kuipers, Special to The Times

The crowd for the opening at Lightbox gallery was pretty impressive, for what is still an emerging space in a new part of town. The reception for painter and collagist Stefan Hirsig's pop-influenced exhibition, "There Is Water at the Bottom of the Ocean," was full of established L.A. art figures who gallerists love to see. In the milling crowd were artists Chris Wilder, Rachel Lachowicz, Charles Gaines and George Stoll, rock 'n' roll designer Henry Duarte, actress Marisa Tomei, war photographer David Butow, art dealer Dan Hug and Artillery magazine editor Tulsa Kinney.

It was a stormy Saturday night, and owner Kim Light seemed pleased at the turnout, achieving a kind of rock-star vibe herself in jeans and a leather shirt. Hirsig's work and her reputation are part of the draw, but finally, so is the location. She is among several high-profile art dealers to have settled an industrialized stretch of South La Cienega, technically in the city of Los Angeles, but across the street from a piece of Culver City now officially designated as the Culver City Art District.

Since 2003, when art world heavyweights Blum & Poe relocated to La Cienega, only a few doors down from what would become Lightbox, more than 30 galleries have moved to the district. Why here? For starters: lots of big, empty spaces and cheap rent, in a locale just off the Santa Monica Freeway and adjacent to wealthy Westside neighborhoods where art collectors live. But it was also the chance to remake an entire area, organically, just for visual art, bringing a vitality and commonality of experience the art world can claim as its own.

Or maybe it was just the chance to party.

"On opening nights, it's like Westwood in the '80s," said BLK/ MRKT Gallery co-owner Jana DesForges. "People have their wine and wander down the street. It gets packed."

Seemingly overnight, the district has achieved the kind of critical mass that makes it chic to be in, say, Berlin, and mention how you were just in Culver City. Two years ago they would have asked you where that was. Now they've heard it enough times to pretend they know.

"You can't not go here anymore," said Tim Blum, one half of Blum & Poe. "It's definitely entrenched. It's a real community being promoted extensively all over the world."

And there's a nice dividend: Locals are getting turned onto art. There's the collectors swinging by at all hours, the museum curators sniffing around, but plenty of the Saturday patrons are newbies — people from the neighborhood, often out with their kids — and they're not only gawking. They're buying.

Like a magnet

The spot on La Cienega that is now Mandrake has always been a bar — a gay bar before this, a series of delightful dives — but never exactly trendy.

At 10 on the night of Light's opening, Mandrake is packed with hipsters and pretty young things who've spilled out of now-closed galleries looking for somewhere to go. Artist Frances Stark and Dot Dot Dot design magazine's Stuart Bailey are DJing; artist DJs, in fact, are a staple of the place. Patrons huddle in intense te^te-a`-te^tes. Crowds push past the bright blue bar and a Raymond Pettibon drawing that laments, "I thought California would be different," and into a large exhibition/happening room hung with a collection of tote bags from art events — a show assembled by Drew Heitzler, one of Mandrake's three co-owners.

"Justin [Beal], Drew and I are all artists. That's our world," said co-owner Flora Wiegmann, who is married to Heitzler. "So we have myriad events that go on here. It ranges from a very formalized film series that's happening every other week for an entire year, to a knitting group or whatever."

Mandrake opened in September and has been integral to the area's expansion, and that's no accident. The bar "was to serve as a sort of anchor for the neighborhood," said Wiegmann, who, along with Heitzler, used to run a space around the corner on Comey Avenue called Champion Fine Art. "We just felt like the street needed a place where people could convene and take a break."

Blum and Jeff Poe agreed, and became the principal investors in the space. "It's a great neighborhood bar," Poe said.

It's doubtful Culver City's Art District would have happened at all without Blum and Poe. In January 2003, the two were looking to move their gallery from a smaller, 1,200-square-foot space on Broadway in Santa Monica and couldn't find the right place. Other areas, from Santa Monica to Chinatown, were too expensive, too establishment or had too much of an art student vibe. They even tried to buy a building in Chinatown, but the deal fell through. For "some weird reason," Blum said, they looked at a stretch of commercial buildings on La Cienega just south of the 10 freeway, totally removed from other established gallery areas.

The corner at Washington and La Cienega was entirely industrial, a series of windowless brick buildings straddling the concrete ditch of Ballona Creek and surrounded by tire stores, an industrial lighting house and a lumberyard. But here they found a clean brick building and 5,000 square feet of space.

"The space was available, and we just said, 'Screw it. Let's go for it,' " Blum said.

This was no small event, however. Blum & Poe represents a roster of internationally renowned artists including Sam Durant, Takashi Murakami, Jennifer Bornstein, Sharon Lockhart and Mark Grotjahn. Blum said he and Poe were pretty sure the collectors would come. But would anyone else?

"You can't script that. We're not developers," Blum said.

But come they did. Kim Light got a call from Poe, who once worked with her, and ended up taking another of the spaces. And then, quickly, came Lauri Firstenberg at LAXART, a nonprofit institution that had also been looking in Chinatown and Koreatown but not seeing anything it liked.

"Culver City was an incredible opportunity, since there are so many artists' and architects' studios here," said Firstenberg, who teaches at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (Sci-Arc).

Susanne Vielmetter brought in her gallery; Lizabeth Oliveria came — one after another, all taking adjacent buildings. Two galleries — Western Project and Fresh Paint — had already been established a few blocks away in downtown Culver City.

"These warehouses or factories — mine used to be a glass and mirror factory — you could just do a lot of things," gallery owner Anna Helwing said. "And then, convenience — it's right in the middle of everything.

"You have to grow up in L.A. to get it," Poe said. "The freeway access is huge. People will come here. It's easy to get to."

New, emerging galleries followed the established dealers, including many from what Blum and others call a "parallel" art world, such as Billy Shire Fine Arts (Shire also owns the ultra-hip La Luz de Jesus Gallery and Soap Plant store).

Lesser-known contemporary galleries brought a lot of art fans and buyers eager to come to openings and get in the game. Crowds drew more crowds, and the area exploded.

"Another good restaurant in this area would be great, so put that in your story!" Helwing said with a laugh.

With open arms

On a quiet Thursday afternoon, Sci-Arc students Jarod Poenisch, Sam Keville and Anthony Lagnay stopped in at BLK/ MRKT Gallery to check out a group show. The work is graphic novel-inspired, mostly figurative paintings with a razor-sharp urban edge. The trio had come to see an art-in-architecture show called "Entropy" at the nearby Koplin Del Rio Gallery, and it was their first time in the district.

"I've definitely heard a lot about it," Keville said.

"Even my parents — they're thinking about moving to L.A., and they're interested in Culver City. They live in Austin," Poenisch added.

Chances are they'll find some decent restaurants too, despite the pleas of Helwing. Patrons can retire to Beacon, a popular Asian cafe, or the bright La Dijonnaise, or get their fine dining at Wilson, the newest restaurant from Piccolo chef Michael Wilson. Surfas, the tremendously popular gourmet shop, is a favorite stop for lunch. A more recent arrival, further into downtown, is the red-hot steakhouse Ford's Filling Station. Restaurants a few blocks from the district's hub at Washington and La Cienega haven't seen a hike in business so far. But Vincent Trevino, owner of Bluebird Cafe' on National Boulevard, sees the potential. He soon plans to extend his Monday-through-Friday schedule into the weekends.

"With the Art District and the Ballona Creek trailhead, which is right here, and then the Exposition Line stopping right here, the weekends are going to get big," Trevino said.

The arrival of the Exposition light-rail line, which will link downtown with the district by 2010, is not lost on Culver City officials, who are working up a plan to keep an "artist influence" in the development planned around the line's terminus at National and Washington. This is indicative of the city's reaction to the gallery influx — it welcomed it with open arms.

City officials piggybacked on what Blum & Poe and others had created on the L.A. side of La Cienega by waiving some permit fees or shepherding new galleries through permitting processes on the Culver City side of the line. "It's not like we sat down and consciously said three years ago that this was going to be an art district in Culver City. It evolved," said Christine Byers, public art and historic preservation coordinator for the city, and one half of its Cultural Division.

It was a quick evolution — mostly within 24 months — and in June 2006, Byers and her colleague Susan Obrow, Culver City's performing arts and special events coordinator, began a community event called Artwalk Culver City. They contacted businesses, put musicians in the street and sent brochures home with Culver City schoolkids. In the end, they had what looked to be a new tradition. This year's Artwalk will be June 2.

"We ended up, we think, having 1,500 people wandering the streets. And it was one of the hottest weekends to date, hitting 90 degrees," said Obrow, who added that one of the galleries reported selling 21 pieces that day. "There was economic impact for the galleries and for Culver City. They seemed pleased with the response."

"Culver City gets it," Poe said. "Much better than the city of Los Angeles. They don't do much, culturally. But Culver City has been good."

How good? Poe said he was now seeing the surest sign of success: The low real estate prices that lured the galleries are starting to catch up with them. "I'm hearing about gallery spaces here going up to $2.40 a foot. Pretty soon it'll be too expensive to be around here too." He smiled briefly. "Then there'll have to be a new area. That's the way it goes."

*

Getting to the art of the matter

The Culver City gallery scene has exploded in just the last few years — but, in fact, a good chunk of it is in Los Angeles too. To get to the heart of it, just take the La Cienega Boulevard exit off the 10 Freeway. Here's a look at some gallery and dining options:

Galleries

1. Blum & Poe, 2754 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 836-2062, blumandpoe.com
Tim Blum and Jeff Poe helped pioneer the area, moving in in 2003.

2. Anna Helwing Gallery, 2766 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A. (310) 202-2213, annahelwinggallery.com
Another early settler.

3. Angstrom Gallery, 2622 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 204-3334, angstromgallery.com
New branch of a Dallas gallery.

4. Bandini Art, 2635 S. Fairfax Ave., Culver City, (310) 837-6230, bandiniart.com
Approaching its first anniversary.

5. Billy Shire Fine Arts, 5790 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 297-0600, billyshirefinearts.com
A Westside outpost from a champion of the lowbrow.

6. BLK/MRKT Gallery, 6009 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 837-1989, blkmrktgallery.com
An early arrival on the scene.

7. Cardwell Jimmerson, 8568 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 815-1100, cardwelljimmerson.com
Newcomer in postwar art.

8. Cherry and Martin (not on map), 12611 Venice Blvd., L.A., (310) 398-7404, cherryandmartin.com
Southwest of the scene, but part of the Culver City Artwalk.

9. Corey Helford Gallery, 8522 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 287-2340, coreyhelfordgallery.com
Opened in April.

10. d.e.n. contemporary, 6023 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 559-3023, dencontemporaryart.com
Focuses on abstract art.

11. Denizen Design Gallery, 8600 Venice Blvd., L.A., (310) 838-1959, denizendesigngallery.com
Art meets furniture and household.

12. Fresh Paint Art Advisors, 9355 Culver Blvd., Suite B, Culver City, (310) 558-9355, freshpaintart.com
Gallery and consultancy.

13. George Billis Gallery L.A., 2716 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 838-3685, georgebillis.com
From the Chelsea district to L.A.

14. Gregg Fleishman, 3850 Main St., Culver City, (310) 202-6108, greggfleishman.com
Furniture, architecture and art.

15. Harvey Levine Gallery, 5902 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 614-7642, levinegallery.com
Emerging artists; space may move.

16. Hedi Khorsand Gallery, 3850 Main St., Culver City, (323) 650-8980, hkfineartgallery.com
A West Hollywood transplant.

17. Kinkead Contemporary, 6029 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 838-7400, kinkeadcontemporary.com
Made the scene in September.

18. Koplin Del Rio, 6031 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 836-9055, koplindelrio.com
Another WeHo transplant.

19. The Lab 101 Gallery, 8530-B Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 558-0911, thelab101.com
Moved from Santa Monica in 2004.

20. L.A. Contemporary, 2634 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 559-6200, lacontemporary.com
A recent arrival.

21. LAXart, 2640 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 559-0166, laxart.orgA leading L.A. nonprofit.

22. Lightbox, 2656 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 559-1111, lightbox.tv
Another high-profile gallery.

23. Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery, 2712 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 837-1073, lizabetholiveria.com
In the heart of "gallery row."

24. MC, 6086 Comey Ave., L.A., (323) 939-3777, mckunst.com
Part of the early wave.

25. Museum of Design Art and Architecture, 8609 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 558-0902, modaagallery.com
Emphasizes art and architecture's "symbiotic relationship."

26. The Museum of Jurassic Technology, 9341 Venice Blvd., Culver City, (310) 836-6131, mjt.org
Off-the-wall curiosities.

27. Overtones Gallery (not on map), 11306 Venice Blvd., L.A., (310) 915-0346, overtones.org
Southwest of the scene, but on Culver City Artwalk.

28. Project, 8545 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 558-0200, project.bz
Launched in 2005.

29. Sandroni.Rey, 2762 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 280-0111, sandronirey.com
Relocated from Venice in 2004.

30. sixspace, 5803 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 932-6200, sixspace.com
Moved from downtown L.A. in '05.

31. Susanne Vielmetter, 5795 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, (323) 933-2117, vielmetter.com
A veteran gallerist.

32. Taylor De Cordoba, 2660 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 559-9156, taylordecordoba.com
Founded in April 2006.

33. walter maciel gallery, 2642 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 839-1840, waltermacielgallery.com
Newcomer with SF roots.

34. Western Project, 3830 Main St., Culver City, (310) 838-0609, western-project.com
On the scene in 2003.

Bars and Restaurants

35. Mandrake
2692 S. La Cienega Blvd., L.A., (310) 837-3297, mandrakebar.com
A hub where artists kick back.

36. Bluebird Cafe', 8572 National Blvd., Culver City, (310) 841-0939, bluebirdcafela.com
Sandwiches, salads, cupcakes.

37. La Dijonaise, 8703 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 287-2770, ladijonaise.com
Croissants and more.

38. Beacon, 3280 Helms Ave., L.A., (310) 838-7500, beacon-la.com
Celebrated Asian cuisine.

39. Wilson, 8631 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 287-2093, wilsonfoodandwine.com
Michael Wilson's adventurous fare.

40. Tea Forest, 8686 Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 815-1723, teaforest.com
A cute tea shop.

41. Cafe' Surfas, 8777 W. Washington Blvd., Culver City, (310) 558-1458, cafesurfas.com
The restaurant supply store's cafe.

42. Ford's Filling Station, 9531 Culver Blvd., Culver City, (310) 202-1470, fordsfillingstation.net
Ben Ford's "gastropub."

[dragonsky]

March 9, 2007

LACMA director changes plan for new entrance
Citing the city's fine weather, director Michael Govan opts for an open-air design instead of a 'glass box.'


By Mike Boehm, Times Staff Writer

Visitors to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will get an alfresco welcome when its new entrance pavilion opens next winter, instead of the glassed-in greeting initially envisioned two years ago by architect Renzo Piano.

The switch comes at the behest of museum director Michael Govan who, after being hired away from New York's Dia Art Foundation a year ago, decided that a glass pavilion would be a waste of good Southern California weather. The BP Grand Entrance, named Tuesday in honor of a $25-million gift from the oil company, will have a roof for rare rainy days and solar panels to exploit the many sunny ones. Otherwise, it will be an open-air structure, a sort of mega-gazebo on the museum's doorstep, supported by steel beams painted a bright red-orange.

"I come from New York, and it would kill me to go into a glass box" instead of enjoying the weather while milling outside the museum, Govan quipped in an interview after announcing the BP donation from a podium set up in front of the entrance's steel skeleton.

Along with the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, under construction just west of the new entrance and also expected to open next February, the BP Grand Entrance is a signature feature of Phase One of the museum's incremental renovation and expansion. Two additional phases are projected, but only after enough money is raised for each part; fundraising is now complete for the first phase at $191 million, which will cover construction and a boost to LACMA's endowment.

Other new features of the first phase are a park behind the Broad building, dotted with large sculptures, and an underground parking garage. Construction expenses, including architects' fees and other "soft costs," are projected at $156 million, LACMA officials said.

Omitting glass walls and doors saved $2.5 million, but Govan said the change to the entrance is "not about savings, it's about efficiency and meaning." The signal he hopes visitors will get by being outside on arrival is that the museum is an outdoor experience as well as an indoor pursuit, "a kind of town square for Los Angeles" — with the park and its sculptures to be enjoyed along with the works inside the seven exhibition buildings strung along Wilshire Boulevard.

Make that eight, if Govan has his way with another new element: an additional museum building that would be planted over the parking garage during the LACMA makeover's second phase. He wants more space to show off the collection, which ranges from ancient to contemporary art, and to give the museum more flexibility for hosting traveling exhibitions.

Govan said that architect Piano has made preliminary schematic drawings for the building, and that its planning is being funded with part of the $25 million that LACMA backers Lynda and Stewart Resnick initially gave for the first phase, but decided to apply to Phase Two after BP stepped forward with its gift. Phase Two also includes renovations to the former May Co. department store building known as LACMA West.

Govan said the new Phase Two museum of his dreams would be comparable to Dia:Beacon, the skylit former factory on the Hudson River in Beacon, N.Y., whose renovation he had overseen. The hallmarks, he said, would include lots of natural light, flexibility and a spacious "generosity of feeling ... elegant and functional."

[Chase Unperson]

I have been a frequent attendee of Culver City openings since "back in the day" of 2004. I had no idea it was in its nascent phase then, but man has it grown. It's awesome, free taco trucks, free tecate beer and some of the worldwide major players in the gallery scene along with creative start-ups and transplants from cities with faltering art scenes (e.g. lizabeth oliveria gallery).

[dragonsky]

Pasadena artist goes out on a limb
A tree in the Rose Bowl parking lot has become the project and passion of artist Joel Tauber.



By Sharon Mizota, Special to The Times

Artist Joel Tauber was captivated the first time he laid eyes on the little sycamore in the middle of the Rose Bowl parking lot. "It struck me on a metaphorical level," he says. "It just seemed like this forgotten figure in this sea of asphalt, and that seemed indicative of where we are environmentally."

Since that day two years ago, Tauber has devoted his life and art to the tree. He began watering it and installed metal railings to protect it from cars. Now he is helping it reproduce. With the assistance of the Theodore Payne Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to the preservation of native California plants, he has collected its seeds and grown "tree babies."

Tauber has documented his efforts with similar dedication. Titled "Sick-Amour," the project includes a documentary film, a video installation and, most ambitiously, a permanent "tree museum." The plan for the latter calls for replacing the asphalt in a roughly 1,900-square-foot rectangle around the tree with mulch and river stones, to increase oxygen and water flow. A "necklace" of boulders will protect the tree and display educational plaques. To top it off, Tauber has sculpted a whimsical pair of "earrings" to hang from the branches.

"When he told me that he had fallen in love with a tree, I wasn't surprised," says Susanne Vielmetter, whose Culver City gallery represents Tauber. In previous projects the L.A.-based artist has transposed underwater diving into music and flown over the desert suspended from helium balloons while playing a bagpipe. "You think it's funny and a little nutty, and sweet," Vielmetter continued, but "Sick-Amour" really addresses a much larger issue, "in this case, fundamentally, what our relationship to nature is."

The video installation, which will have its debut at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects on March 17, consists of 12 segments. Arranged in the shape of a tree, each is a personal meditation on some aspect of the sycamore. In one, Tauber lauds the tree as an "invisible worker" thanklessly cleaning the air and Earth; in another he laments the pests that attack it, comparing their exploits to the abuses of capitalism. Backed by scientific research and narrated in a passionate, though often humorous, voice, Tauber's videos urge viewers to consider the environ-mental toll of urban development and to better care for the natural features that survive within it.

"I think of it as a modern, video 'Walden,' " he ventures, referring to Henry David Thoreau's treatise on nature and society, "but not out in the wilderness, out in a parking lot."

Accordingly, "Sick-Amour" has far-reaching ethical and philosophical goals. The tree is "something that I'm striving to understand in as full a way as possible, and that process brings me very close to it," Tauber says. "If you understand the other — whether it's the divine or someone else — that allows empathy to occur, and it allows a place for some kind of spiritual connection and love." In asking people to empathize with the struggles of a single tree, he hopes to instill in them a heartfelt sense of responsibility, not only to theenvironment but also to one another.

For Tauber, Rose Bowl Parking Lot K is an example of what happens when people shirk this responsibility. Traversed on a Tuesday afternoon by the occasional jogger and a fire engine practicing maneuvers, the lot is an asphalt peninsula between the hills and the concrete-lined Arroyo Seco river. The "Sick-Amour" tree stands not far from the entrance, at Seco Street and West Drive, and the Rose Bowl has already replaced a 400-square-foot area of pavement around it with mulch.

Tauber, compact and energetic, strides enthusiastically around a wider perimeter that he hopes will contain the tree museum.

Getting this far has been a daunting bureaucratic undertaking, involving coordination with the Rose Bowl, the city of Pasadena and LAXART, a nonprofit arts organization that is helping with fundraising. But Tauber says he has met with surprisingly little resistance.

Vice Mayor Steve Madison, an early supporter, sees the project as emblematic of Pasadena's movement toward becoming a "green" city. "I thought it was a neat idea that this one tree could be symbolic of trees in Pasadena and open space," he says. Rose Bowl General Manager Darryl Dunn is open-minded but cautious: "We still have to function as a stadium, but we're trying to integrate his vision with our need to have a parking lot." The plan requires approval from the Rose Bowl's board of directors, which is scheduled to review it later this spring.

Still, fundraising for the project, which Tauber estimates will cost $22,000, has been challenging. "We've been coming up against perceptions of what constitutes art, what is public art," says Lauri Firstenberg, LAXART's director and curator. "We've been diversifying our approach."

Tauber has solicited donations and says he plans to use proceeds from the sale of the tree babies and an edition of earrings — for humans, made of gold-plated leaves and fruit from the tree — to help fund the museum.

In the meantime, his beloved sycamore has sprouted new leaves and fruit. Tauber says, "It's a beautiful tree, and people are drawn to it. It's casting its spell."

[bobcat]

More national coverage of the LA art scene.
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Fine Art Flourishes in Tinseltown.(Off Hours: Leisure Pursuits for--and by--Entrepreneurs). Jason Tanz.
FSB 17.2 (March 2007): p96.



Full Text:COPYRIGHT 2007 Time, Inc.

Byline: Jason Tanz/Los Angeles

L.A. may be known for starlets and freeways, but lately art collectors are flocking to the city's galleries.

THE PHOTOGRAPHS LOOK ripped from the pages of National Geographic. I'm standing upstairs at Ace Gallery in Beverly Hills, staring at five-foot-tall images of sumptuous landscapes: a pier glowing in the moonlight; a golden desert, so lifelike that my mouth gets dry just gazing at it. I'm instantly drawn by the fine detail of the shots and relaxed by the silent scenery. Until I notice the bodies. A corpse dressed in a ball gown sprawls next to the Santa Monica pier. Near the desert sagebrush, two stiletto-heeled feet jut out of a barrel. Similarly grim figures inhabit the other images surrounding me.

MELANIE PULLEN, WHO TOOK THE PICTURES, stands next to me, beaming. And why not? At 31, the self-taught photographer is preparing her second show here at Ace Gallery (acegallery.net), one of the most prestigious art venues in the area. Pullen explains to me that her works are recreations of crime-scene photographs from the first half of the 20th century. She has placed couture-draped fashion models where the original victims once lay. "The main idea behind it is exploring where the news has taken us as a society," she says. "We're so desensitized to violence that it's become commercial. This series became a way of playing with exploitation."

I have come to Los Angeles to see why so many art aficionados are flocking here. I'm also pretending that I have tens of thousands of dollars to spend on art, to experience the process of building a collection. And I can't help but wonder: After coming home from a long day at the office, do I really want to plunk down on the couch and unwind under an image of a dead woman stuffed in a barrel?

This is not a question I am about to ask out loud, because it is exactly the kind of query--along with "Can I get something in maroon to match my La-Z-Boy?"--that would mark me as a grade-A philistine. Michelle Isenberg, an art advisor who introduced me to Pullen, warned me as much this morning. "The best art can be difficult or challenging," she said. "If you hate something, or if it's disturbing to you, oftentimes that's a good sign."

If that advice seems counterintuitive, so might the prospect of traveling to Los Angeles to purchase fine art. Woody Allen once quipped that L.A.'s greatest cultural advantage was the opportunity to make a right turn at a red light, and for decades the city has been derided as a hotbed of frivolity. But, fueled by talented graduates from some of the country's most competitive art schools, Los Angeles has started to win recognition as one of the most vibrant art cities in the world. The work of L.A. artists who came of age in the early 1990s--such as Mike Kelley, Lari Pittman, and Jim Shaw--has recently exploded in value, drawing the attention of art collectors to the latest crop. Last year Paris's Pompidou Center launched "Los Angeles 1955- 1985: The Birth of an Artistic Capital," single-handedly raising the city's profile. "This boom has been coming for the last decade-and-a-half," says Michael Duncan, a Los Angeles corresponding editor of the journal Art in America. "The younger generation now is reaping the benefits. There is a lot of speculation going on right now. A lot."

It all adds up to a very dangerous environment for the amateur art collector, especially when you consider that newbies aren't likely to get access to the most desired paintings and sculptures. "A gallery won't offer its best work to someone who hasn't done business with them before," says Bennett Roberts, co-owner of Roberts & Tilton (robertsandtilton.com), a gallery on Wilshire Boulevard. "Getting the best art requires entree."

That's why I hired Isenberg, a 25-year veteran of the Los Angeles art scene and the owner of Isenberg & Associates (misenberg.com), a consultancy for neophytes who want to buy art but don't know where to look. Isenberg will charge me $200 an hour, although she usually charges 10% to 15% of any sale she helps broker. (For more on art advisors, see the "Resources" box on the next page.)

A typical client is Douglas O'Donnell, 40, who owns a small industrial-development company and recently hired Isenberg to help him adorn his new home in Laguna Beach. "I could have done this without a consultant, but I don't think I'd want to," he says. "There's so much value added. I may see a piece of art that I like, but I don't know where it fits historically or how it's going to be looked upon ten, 20, 30 years from now. I like art, but this is still an investment."

ONE WAY TO ENSURE that your investment pays off is to buy from an artist with a proven track record; it's likely to cost a bit more but is also more likely to appreciate. To that end, the first stop in our L.A. art tour takes us to the home and studio of Douglas Busch, who has been creating art for 40 years. Busch designed his light-infused modernist mansion, which rests atop the hills of Malibu, affording inspiring views of the ocean on one side and rolling foothills on the other. When we pull into his driveway, the 55-year-old is talking on his cellphone while a team of contractors mill around his swimming pool. If great art requires suffering, then it's hard to imagine that Busch is producing much great art these days.

But in fact, he is. Busch made his name in the 1980s and '90s with his strikingly detailed black-and-white photographs of landscapes and city buildings. But in 2003, while spending the summer in a small house on the beach, Busch pointed his camera toward the ocean and captured blurred images of waves, sand, and sky, washes of color that look more like Mark Rothko's paintings than Busch's earlier photographs. Today Busch is just about done with his ocean photographs--he's returning to producing smaller black-and-white landscapes--but he says the series has introduced him to an entirely new group of clients. Prices run from $450 for 36 square inches to $25,000 for six feet square.

Busch's Malibu home may inspire him, but younger--and less established--artists usually seek their muses in grimier climes. That helps explain why Culver City, an expanse that features low-slung warehouses, has become a hotbed of galleries. Susanne Vielmetter, 47, was one of the first to move into the area when she opened Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects (vielmetter.com) about three years ago, and today she is renowned for showing, in her words, "work that is a little more challenging, with a strong conceptual base, and that often has political implications."

Take, for example, Rodney McMillian, 38, whose paintings and sculptures often offer a sardonic take on art, race, and culture. Vielmetter showed me slides of a recent show of McMillian's, which included a 130-square-foot painting of a sky that he parceled off and sold for between $150 to $450 per square foot (the price was calculated based on the buyers' income levels); a dilapidated chair; and a collection of carpet samples culled from the churches and storefronts of Los Angeles. The work may be edgy, but it has also won some institutional plaudits; three of McMillian's works were included in a group show at the prestigious Hammer Museum (hammer.ucla.edu) in the Westwood neighborhood. For her part, Isenberg approved. When I expressed interest in a photograph of a formal-looking bust slathered in black paint, she nodded. "I would say to you, buy this. Absolutely." (She was right. The photograph, with frame, cost $3,500 when I first saw it; three weeks later the price was $6,000.)

Vielmetter may find herself drawn to such challenging, abrasive work, but some of her artists' offerings are downright ... pleasant. After we visited Vielmetter's gallery, we took a drive to the Mount Washington neighborhood to visit the home studio of Patrick Wilson, whose motivation is "the hope of adding some beautiful object for the world to look at." His paintings stack squares of color atop one another until they take on the illusion of dimension, almost as if he has dug through the flat surface of the easel to discover further color swatches residing within. Wilson, 37, happily admits that his paintings buck the trend toward conceptualism--"They're meant to be looked at more than to be decoded." Prices start at $4,000 and run as high as $20,000.

Good luck decoding the sculptures of Krysten Cunningham (krystencunningham.com), whom we visited the next morning in her studio in the down-at-heel Arlington Heights neighborhood. Her art appears innocent enough, a melange of yarn and sticks , woven and folded together to create abstract bursts of light and form. Here's how Cunningham, 33, describes it: "I've done some research on the fourth dimension, which is not a proven dimension. But there's a model, a hypercube, which has 16 sides as opposed to six sides. I think. And this is actually a model of a hypercube. This is how a hypercube would look if you could see all the planes at once." Whatever! You don't need to be a theoretical mathematician to appreciate the bold color and angles of Cunningham's sculptures, which go for about $10,000.

Cunningham's art was not the weirdest we saw, not by a long shot. I'll spare you details on the video installation of an amateur aeronaut strapping himself to a bunch of helium balloons while playing the bagpipes, or the re-creation of a fast-food drive-thru menu that listed famous artists instead of hamburgers. I admired those works, but--Isenberg's advice notwithstanding--even if I had tens of thousands of dollars to spend, I wouldn't buy them. I'm not saying it needs to match the couch, but if I'm going to drop $10,000 on a piece of art, can't it at least complement the drapes?

[dragonsky]

March 10, 2007
LACMA is considering a palm garden

Diane Haithman

On the heels of a vote by city officials to stop planting new fan palm trees in favor of sycamores, oaks and other leafy native species, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art says it is considering adding more palms as part of the redesign of its Wilshire Boulevard campus.

In a conversation with Robert Irwin, designer of the Getty Center gardens, at a museum event Thursday night, LACMA director Michael Govan said the museum was working with Irwin on tentative plans for a palm garden for the 17 acres of parkland behind the museum.

"It's just in process, not definite — there's no funding, no nothing yet," Govan said in an interview Friday. "We're doing research now about collecting palms; we made a few jokes about the mayor getting rid of palms. The thing is, they have so much to do with Los Angeles, they're such visible symbols of the city. One of the reasons Robert Irwin loves the palms is how the beautiful tall trunks hold the light, the sunset and sunrise of L.A."

Govan said the tentative plan called for adding new varieties of palm trees to complement the washingtonian and date palms already standing near the front of the museum campus. "If the palms of the city start to get replaced by oak trees, certainly they'll then find themselves as cultural objects, and it's almost incumbent on the museum to begin to collect them," he said.

[dragonsky]

L.A.'s killer theater
There’s an edgy breed of dinner theater on the menu — if you don’t mind a little murder with your meal.



By Margaret Wappler, Times Staff Writer

It's a Saturday night at the French restaurant Taix in Echo Park, and a couple of drag queens named Roxxi Botoxxi and Sandy Mangina are engaging an audience of increasingly tipsy Eastsiders. Mangina, a.k.a. Ben Been, a brunet in a hoop skirt, surveys the male patrons with an overheated up-and-down stare and banters uneasily with the women.

"So what's your story?" she says, audaciously catty.

Before you have time to reply, she breaks off, relaying a piece of seemingly inane gossip about one of her three achingly plucked, padded and powdered castmates in the year-old Drama Queen Theater. By the time the show begins — it's a light murder mystery that includes a dance contest and an Amazonian detective with a name that can't be printed here — all sense of decorum has been lost, or at least redefined.

This is dinner theater, reinvented. The Drama Queens' version of the venerable theatrical institution represents something of the lunatic fringe, to be sure, but throughout the Southland small troupes are applying their own twist to a form that probably saw its heyday in the 1980s but lately has had all the sizzle of a mullet.

The vision of cold, dark places with over-emotive actors in crooked wigs and circles of rouge has been replaced with quick, clever productions that increasingly rely on the formula of the murder mystery. Most invite crowd participation — where else can you be accused of a heinous crime over dessert? And, yes, the performers are generally real people with day jobs involving things like hard drives and research reports, but there's something cathartic about the proximity of audience to actor. It's not as if Laurence Fishburne is going to sit down next to you at the Pasadena Playhouse for an extemporaneous bit.

Traditional dinner theater is still out there, but for now we flitted about the Southland with one question: Whodunit?

The Dinner Detective

If the State, the '90s comedy troupe with Michael Showalter and Michael Ian Black, ever reunited to start a dinner theater production, it might have the same vibe as the Dinner Detective, which features a young cast plucked from Improv Olympic, Groundlings and Second City. The show at Cucino Paradiso restaurant in the Palms neighborhood bounces between tongue-in-cheek noir, easy gags and raunchy improv.

Kelly, 31, and Scott O'Brien, 29, met while working for TV guru David E. Kelley, using Scott's experience as a crime researcher for "The Practice" to start the Dinner Detective in 2004. They've sold out nearly every show, which they credit to keeping the script loose. "The actors know when they need to hit this beat or that, but we want it to be able to go in 10 different directions," Scott says. "We want the audience to shape the show."

And the audience — young, extroverted and energetic — is up to the task. Guests make up names, and Joe, the host, hands out sheets with suggested interrogation questions such as "Do I look good in this outfit?" Later, hard-nosed cops played by John Abbott and Ronn Ozuk sidle up to tables and give the guests a hard time. To a tattooed, goateed man from Palmdale, Ozuk barks: "So, Alice in Chains, what secrets do you have to hide?"

As the night unfolds, the detectives continue their teasing, and two women in their 50s who call themselves the Jersey Girls respond in kind, cracking wise at every possible juncture. After the show, one of the actors, Chris Alvarado, claims that one of the Jersey Girls gave him a hug and then licked his ear. "I was not expecting that," he says with a laugh. "But then she also slipped me her card and she's an executive producer at some TV network, so I guess it's OK."

Gourmet Detective

The setting is pure Orange County: The Mezzanine Restaurant is tucked away in a glass-and-steel mini-scraper that is tucked away in an office park. But this Irvine production is charmingly modest — a mix of sloppy theatrics, wink-wink silliness and gentle nostalgia.

It's the brainchild of husband-and-wife team Craig Wilson and Tracy Hulette, who started the Gourmet Detective in 1990 with no theater background. "We're both sort of shy," Wilson says. "We didn't want to create an interactive theater environment that's frightening for the audience."

Unless you have a fear of feather boas, you're safe here. Actress Katherine Prenovost, a UCLA researcher by day, stomps around and plays to a crowd that includes college students in hoodies and a table of chatty couples in their late 30s. The traditional production, "Darling, You Slay Me," is a 1920s throwback that uses the play-within-a-play convention. While the audience dines, characters with names such as Dick March and April June swish around with cigarette holders, pouring stiff drinks, accusing one another in growls and purrs and invoking healthy doses of bawdy-but-PG humor. Have you heard the one about the casting couch?

Keith & Margo's Murder Mystery

Founded in 1985, the longest-running murder-mystery dinner theater outfit in Los Angeles seeks to emulate the satisfying procedural plotting of "Law & Order," but with a big dose of interactive comedy. With actors embedded in the audience, the show is very realistic, which has led to unexpected ramifications in the past. At the weekend murder mystery events the group hosts at hotels, "people break into each other's rooms," co-founder Margo Morrison says. The actors have gone overboard too: On a train-bound event, an actor posing as a real detective reported a "murder" to an Amtrak employee, bringing the locomotive to a halt for two hours.

The dinner show, every Saturday at the sparkling West L.A. restaurant Aphrodisiac, starts with a social hour. The actors, disguised as regular Joes, are there too, but it's difficult to tell who's who.

The main show takes place in the plush dining room. The first murder is surrounded by lots of hullabaloo involving popguns. A tiny woman bursts in, wearing an LAPD jacket. Feisty Anita Goodwin, a Keith & Margo veteran of 10 years, grills members of the audience and reveals a dizzying array of clues, including the unfailingly exciting ransom note. At the end, guests are allowed more time (than at other shows) to pore over the clues and unravel the intricate plot. It's indicative of the kind of fan Keith & Margo's attracts: a serious sleuth who tears into problem-solving like it's a bloody steak.

Mysteries En Brochette

Mysteries En Brochette is the light-rock station of dinner theater — easy, unassuming and safe for work. Situated in Marina del Rey's Harbor House, a moderately classy seafood restaurant, Brochette caters to a crowd that wants to get cheeky on a Friday night but not to the point that it will embarrass Mom.

There are no embedded actors here, only performers in tuxes and gowns, using their best enunciation to play to the intimate room. Brochette founder Muriel Minot, a singing instructor, prefers to keep the action out in the open.

"The more remarkable aspects to us are the scripting, the music and choreography," she says. "When you have red herrings and simultaneous action and embedded actors, that doesn't always play to the whole room." Minot uses what she calls "hand-out characters," i.e., assigning a role to a game audience member, to get the crowd involved.

There are two murders in "Hollywood's Fatal Premiere," one of Brochette's rotating themed productions. But Brochette is more about the music, in a very round-the-campfire kind of way. There are goofy-sweet singalongs to Broadway chestnuts and well-worn radio hits. One of the highlights is Christopher Gehrman's rendition of "Trouble" from "The Music Man" — a marvelously off-kilter version that's a little bit scat, a little bit rap.

Julie Cortez and Aldo Maldonado, a couple in their late 20s from Culver City, are here to celebrate their anniversary. "This is different from just going to a dinner or a club, but I really like it," Cortez says. "I think this means we're getting older."

Drama Queen Theater

From the very beginning, the Drama Queens are not for the faint of heart.

The effervescent hostess, a full-blooded woman in a slinky dress, christens guests with drag queen versions of their real names, and the show races off from there, flirting with full-on chaos at every turn.

The humor is sharp but friendly. "Most people want to be pushed a little bit, but I'm never mean-spirited about it," Ben Been says.

The opening social hour belongs to the queens, who publicly diss each other. The guests are encouraged to mingle as they snack on smoked salmon and fruit, and after the production gets rolling, it's a rambunctious, hyperactive hoot.

There's a dance contest involving the queens and audience members, but the highlight is easily the fierce spectacle of caricatured womanhood, the detective lieutenant. With her popgun and a cinched trench, she commands the room — Sam Spade as channeled by Foxy Brown.

What's on the menu? After a bit of the detective lieutenant's overzealous frisking, who remembers?

*

A selection of the Southland scene:

Gourmet Detective
Mezzanine Restaurant, 19800 MacArthur Blvd., Irvine. (949) 724-1066; gourmetdetective.com. $65 includes a three-course dinner, show and tax. Mellow and nostalgic, it emphasizes '20s-themed entertainment with its "Bullets Over Broadway"-style show, "Darling, You Slay Me." Bring a feather boa.

The Dinner Detective
Cucina Paradiso, 3387 Motor Ave., L.A. (866) 496-0535; dinnerdetective.com.$62.95 includes a four-course dinner, show, gratuity and live music after the show. Young and spunky with an emphasis on improv, the Dinner Detective offers an interactive, high-energy show. Scripts and actors rotate frequently. And there's a chalk body outline on the floor.

Drama Queen Theater
Taix Restaurant, 1911 Sunset Blvd., Echo Park. (310) 949-9255; dqtheater.com. $68 includes a four-course dinner, tax, gratuity and show. Imagine a bunch of drag queens running around, accusing each other of horrible crimes while self-aggrandizing their own fabulousness at every turn.

Keith & Margo's Murder Mystery Dinner Theater
The Witness Room (Aphrodisiac), 10351 Santa Monica Blvd., L.A. (877) 528-9015; murdermystery.com. $78 includes a three-course dinner, tax, gratuity, show and after-show jazz. Like an episode of "Law & Order" but with fewer twists and more high jinks. For fans who take their murder mysteries black and unsweetened.

Curtain Call Dinner Theater
690 El Camino Real, Tustin. (714) 838-1540; curtaincalltheater.com. $36.95 to $47.95 includes a two-course dinner and show. The oldest dinner theater in Southern California opened its doors in April 1980. Now showing "Oklahoma!" Upcoming shows include "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" and "Annie." P.S. The theater doesn't serve alcohol.

Mysteries En Brochette
Harbor House Restaurant, 4211 Admiralty Way, Marina del Rey. (310) 399-1507; mysteriesenbrochette.com. $72 includes a four-course dinner, tax, gratuity and show. A mix of bloody murder and show tunes, dusty oldies and whatever else the Brochette gang feels like digging out of the musical trunk.

Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theater
455 Foothill Blvd., Claremont. (909) 626-1254; candlelightpavilion.com. $41 to $72 includes a two-course dinner and show. Housed in the old Claremont High School's gymnasium, this is a traditional Vegas-like experience. The 2007 season includes "Suessical the Musical," "My Fair Lady" and "Space Oddity."

Sharpo! Murder Mystery Dinner
Queen Mary, 1126 Queen's Highway, Long Beach. (562) 435-3511. queenmary.com. $70 includes a four-course dinner and show. Does it get any better than a murder mystery aboard a historical ocean liner populated with waterlogged ghosts? Nevermind a life jacket; come with an alibi.

[dragonsky]

March 22, 2007
Reeling in comedy fans at Big Fish
Unpredictable laughs and general weirdness at D + D's Joke Machine comedy nights.



By Jonah Flicker, Special to The Times

The words "comedy club" conjure up images of intros to "Seinfeld" episodes, Robin Williams in a frenzied lather at Comic Relief or Sunset Strip joints like the Laugh Factory. There are comedy alternatives in Los Angeles, however, and if you're willing to venture off the beaten path for your laughter fix, you may be richly (and sometimes bizarrely) rewarded.

Take Big Fish, which lies in the industrial wasteland of western Glendale, close to the railroad tracks skirting San Fernando Road. The bar is a fishing expedition-themed dive with cheap beer, stuffed fish adorning the walls and nights devoted to karaoke and "live jams." Tuesday nights, though, are the home of D + D's Joke Machine, an offbeat and sometimes cringe-inducing alt-comedy night.

The weekly event began last August, the creation of comedians Denver Smith and Douggpound (n–e Doug Lussenhop), who is also often host of the show. It regularly draws a mix of aspiring amateurs, more seasoned performers and sad-sack miscreants in search of catharsis. "I always think there must be a mental health clinic around the corner," muses Smith. "There are some sketchy, dark people who come in."

Erratic talent is part of the Joke Machine's charm, although that's not necessarily to Smith's liking. "I always wish it was like Carnegie Hall, a dark theater with people all dressed up," he says. "But it's not. We're fighting against this whole weird Glendale element." Smith and Douggpound book the event, although it's sometimes mistakenly listed as an open-mike. Comedians are provided with a chance to test out new material, and many come armed with notebooks and even jokes written on the palms of their hands.

Two recent nights provided opposite examples of how D + D's Joke Machine can play out. One Tuesday found four people listening to the droll wit of comedian Bennie Arthur, the silence occasionally punctuated by the shrill whistle of a passing train. The following week saw a relatively large and enthusiastic crowd enjoying Matt Braunger's truly hilarious set, which included a bit about lifting weights to the music of the Smiths.

The "weird Glendale element" Smith describes is enhanced by Big Fish's bartender, Cheazer, who provides color commentary during the performances and acts as a de facto id to the proceedings. "It's a very enjoyable night. It's a bonus if [the comedians] are funny," he quips. Of course, Cheazer sees other reasons to attend as well: "It's inexpensive to get drunk and stupid."

D + D's works, not in spite of, but because of, its unpredictability. Although groans and silence may at times outnumber laughs, the stream-of-consciousness rants and uniquely funny jokes make it distinctive. Even without the passing trains.

Big Fish
What: D + D's Joke Machine comedy nights
Where: 5230 San Fernando Road, Glendale
When: Comedy on Tuesdays; bar open daily 10 a.m. to 2 a.m.
Price: No cover. Drinks: draft beer, $2.75; bottled beer, $4; well drinks, $4
Info: (818) 244-6442

[citywatch]

West Coast, Beyond The Coast

Hilary Larson - Travel Writer
thejewishweek.com
3/23/2007

Years ago, whenever I found myself in Los Angeles, I always skipped the museums and concert halls and headed for the beach. After all, I reasoned, you might as well focus on the highlights — New York has better art, L.A. has its spectacular coastal scenery. I still hit the beach whenever I’m in California, and on a recent 90-degree day, I splashed happily into the surf at Venice Beach. But with every visit, I am forced to acknowledge more and more that the Left Coast movie land New Yorkers so love to patronize has become a cultural force to be reckoned with.

While East Coast arts institutions tend toward a sort of classical grandeur and eminence, their West Coast counterparts display qualities reflecting a part of the country where everything is new, vast, expansive and open. We have Carnegie Hall; they have Walt Disney Hall’s shimmering metal curves, endless parking and a lingering sunset in which to take it all in.

The weather remains glorious, the smog has scarcely abated and the traffic still snarls up predictably. But the cultural blossoming reflects in part the reality that whole neighborhoods of Los Angeles are changing, gentrifying, acquiring an urban energy that has long been lacking in this suburban burg.

Long-derelict downtown, once the province of lonely office buildings and lonelier bodegas, is sprouting new condominiums to go with its cultural institutions, including Disney Hall. There is a feeling of renaissance here, though the neighborhood has yet to become the center of nightlife (indeed, it is one of Los Angeles’ charms or its curse that the city lacks a definitive center).

The gentrification of the waterfront towns — which are technically the independent cities of Santa Monica, Venice and Marina Del Rey — continues relentlessly. But what is almost certainly a burden for cash-strapped locals is the visitor’s gain, in the form of beautifully landscaped modernist homes along the waterfront, cleaned-up pedestrian areas and an abundance of chic new eateries and shops. Venice, once a bohemian beach town, is now a chic beachside resort, its maze of picturesque canals as serendipitously lovely as ever. Quaint footbridges link narrow, flower-dotted alleyways; a profusion of tropical and desert flora blooms lushly along the water, as locals row canoes. One can easily pass an afternoon wandering aimlessly along the canals, basking in the sunshine and marveling at the diverse Californian architectural styles of the bungalows.

Tourists head for Venice’s famous boardwalk, where silver-jewelry sellers, weightlifters and Rollerbladers still abound. But in the past few years, the parallel inland street Abbot Kinney Road has evolved into a hipster destination, lined with chic boutiques, cafes and a lively sidewalk scene.

On the cultural front, the Skirball Center is an ever-impressive museum and Jewish cultural institution with the kind of diverse exhibitions that find a way to please everybody. This spring’s programming includes Indian dance, African music and two entertaining art exhibits. Movie posters by the graphic designer Saul Bass, the man responsible for the storyboard for the “Psycho” shower scene, are on view through early April; after that is an upcoming show of Israeli travel posters from across the decades, as interesting from a historical point of view as they are lovely to look at.

Music lovers consider the dashing young conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen, to be one of the most dynamic musicians in America, having established a reputation as a champion of new music and even as a composer in his own right. But the compelling reason to hear the orchestra, which has flourished under his creative baton, is the quintessentially non-New York experience of classical music in a brand-new, Frank Gehry-designed concert hall.

April brings the opportunity to hear the extraordinary Russian violinist Viktoria Mullova, who rarely performs in the U.S. anymore, interpret Beethoven. But perhaps the most memorable concerts will be the return of the “Tristan Project,” a re-imagination of the mesmerizing, dramatic Wagner opera in a series of staged acts that take place in separate concerts, each accompanied by video art by Bill Viola. Directed by Peter Sellars and featuring an outstanding cast of performers, this merging of the visual and the auditory, the classic and the avant-garde, seems perfectly at home in Los Angeles — and promises a fresh look at a work that can feel a little too familiar.

Perched high in the green-terraced hills, its glistening white form surrounded by jaw-dropping views over the city, the Getty Center has been the target of more than its share of controversy over the years. It’s not the Met, but its setting alone assures a pleasant experience and is well worth the visit. Those frightened off by early reports of months-long reservation delays will be happy to know that free tickets can be easily ordered online and a frequently available on short notice; parking is plentiful and cheap. The collection, heavy on Western art of the last two centuries, displays some excellent European works in a spacious, light-filled setting. Current exhibitions include two interesting looks at German art: the photographs of Sigmar Polke and a survey entitled “From Caspar David Friedrich to Gerhard Richter: German Paintings from Dresden,” both on view through the end of April.

Last year, the Getty Foundation opened the Getty Villa in Malibu, a lovely Italianate palazzo dedicated to classical art. Those with a more ancient artistic bent will find it worthwhile to check out more than 1,200 Greek, Roman and Etruscan sculptures and artifacts.

And those who prefer sunshine can step outside and stroll down to the always-nearby beach.

[bjornson]

Originally Posted by citywatch

The gentrification of the waterfront towns — which are technically the independent cities of Santa Monica, Venice and Marina Del Rey — continues relentlessly.

Poor, poor writer. Santa Monica is the only independent city. Venice is a part of the city and Marina del Rey is an unincorporated region!

[citywatch]

The Art’s Here. Where’s the Crowd?



By EDWARD WYATT
New York Times
March 25, 2007

LOS ANGELES

JOHN BALDESSARI, the conceptual artist who has long made his home here, for years gave his college art students one piece of advice when they graduated: Go to New York, the capital of the art world. Now, however, Mr. Baldessari has a different view. “I don’t think it matters,” he said recently. “More and more young artists leave school and stay here. The opportunities are better, and the cost of living is cheaper. People involved in art regularly come to L.A. It really doesn’t matter if they live in New York or L.A.”

Two decades after Los Angeles emerged as the nation’s second art capital, the city is reaping the benefits of a migration of artists, galleries, dealers and curators. In recent years more than two artists have moved to this city for every one that moved away, a net rate of gain that is higher than in any metropolitan area in the country, according to an analysis of Census Bureau statistics by Ann Markusen, a professor at the University of Minnesota.

In the process new centers of gravity have emerged for contemporary art and artists in a city that has suffered for years because of its lack of a central arts district. Now there is not one such geographic center but several: downtown, where a thriving gallery district operates in what used to be a nighttime ghost town, as well as in former industrial areas in Culver City and Santa Monica. And a new generation of curators have been lured to the major museums here. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the Hammer Museum have each attracted energizing new talent in recent years.


John Baldessari, a conceptual art-
ist, says he no longer advises art
students to go to New York after
graduating. [Douglas Hill/UCLA
via Bloomberg News]

Of course the city has long since emerged as an important center for the performing arts as well. The Los Angeles Philharmonic, regarded as one of the country’s most dynamic orchestras, gained added allure with its move to Frank Gehry’s 2003 Disney Hall on Grand Avenue, and the Los Angeles Opera is preparing for its first-ever “Ring” cycle next door at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

In architecture Los Angeles has been an incubator not just for Mr. Gehry but for the rising star Thom Mayne, and high-profile commissions by Renzo Piano at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Steven Holl at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County are proceeding apace. And the boom in television and film production in Hollywood has created new opportunities for visual artists and dancers, many of whom also work for companies that perform in or have close ties to Pacific Rim countries.

Yet the city is still struggling to attract cultural tourists. While New York, London and Paris each attract 10 million to 15 million such visitors per year, Los Angeles draws only about 2.5 million, according to a 2004 study by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation.

“Why is that?” asked the philanthropist Eli Broad, the city’s most visible and generous champion of the arts. “Perception. We have not promoted cultural travel. That’s going to start happening, and that’s going to get the city more and more attention.”

Whereas 40 percent of visitors to New York and London take part in some sort of cultural activity — a museum visit, a theatrical performance or the like — and 85 percent of visitors to Paris do so, only about 1 in 10 tourists to Los Angeles visit a cultural site. To remedy that Mr. Broad and other civic leaders are bargaining on their investment in the commercial and cultural districts that are taking shape downtown, like the Grand Avenue Project and L.A. Live, efforts that include hotels, restaurants, shops and entertainment centers. “It will mean a big boost to the economy, and a big boost to how our city is viewed internationally,” Mr. Broad said. “It’s not simply sunshine, beaches and Hollywood here.”


The Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center at the University of California
at Los Angeles. [Douglas Hill/UCLA via Bloomberg News]

But that effort hasn’t been easy. Two years ago Mr. Broad tried to raise $10 million in public financing to promote the arts here. While the city promised $2 million, officials at the county, state and federal levels balked, arguing in part that more private money should be raised for that purpose. For now the effort has stalled, although Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa said in an interview that he would like to create a public-private partnership to accomplish what Mr. Broad proposed. The mayor’s initiative, however, awaits his appointment of a new general manager for the city’s cultural affairs department, a job that has gone unfilled since the previous department manager resigned nine months ago.

The department manager will be charged with fashioning a new cultural master plan for the city, a blueprint for encouraging both local investment in the arts and reaching out to areas of the city that are underserved by museums, theaters and the like. The master plan was last revised in 1991. “I think there are a lot of people who want to get involved in the arts, and would if there was a conduit for it,” Mr. Villaraigosa said in an interview.

But that financial conduit is conspicuously absent, especially at a time when corporations are cutting their arts budgets or using them more for marketing than for philanthropy. That problem is aggravated by the relative shortage of major corporations here: Los Angeles has fewer Fortune 500 companies than Richmond, Va., or Charlotte, N.C. Historically, said Kevin F. McCarthy, a senior social scientist at the Rand Corporation who is working on a study of support systems for the arts in cities around the country, Los Angeles has had three sets of business leaders: the first drawn from the downtown corporations, the second from the high-technology and aerospace industries on the west side, and the third from Hollywood.

“You could never get the entertainment industry to work with the other two guys, even though there were some people who had connections in both communities,” Mr. McCarthy said. The problem with Hollywood leaders, he said, is that “they’re so used to publicity and understanding the importance of marketing that they want to be the center of attention on all of this stuff.”

“I think they also have a very short-sighted focus, like much of the corporate sector, on profits,” he added. “And they tend to see this as a zero-sum game.”

Some Hollywood moguls are already big donors of course. David Geffen gave $5 million in 1996 to the Museum of Contemporary Art; it now maintains the Geffen Contemporary galleries as a separate part of its three-campus institution. Mr. Geffen also gave money for the renovation of a theater near the University of California at Los Angeles campus in Westwood that is now called the Geffen Playhouse. And Disney Hall was built with $120 million from corporations and private donors, along with an initial $50 million from Walt Disney’s widow, Lillian, and more than $100 million from Los Angeles County.


The philanthropist Eli Broad, left,
with Michael Govan, director of
the Los Angeles County Museum
of Art.

Mr. Broad says he is confident that Hollywood’s commitment will increase, in part through the goading of newly arrived museum directors, including Michael Govan. Mr. Govan arrived one year ago from the Dia Art Foundation in New York to take over as director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and has forged new connections with Hollywood. Among his additions to the museum’s board are Barbra Streisand; Michael Crichton; Terry Semel, the chief executive of Yahoo and former co-chief executive of Warner Brothers; and Willow Bay, the television reporter who is married to Robert Iger, chief executive of Disney.

Now, however, Mayor Villaraigosa may be in the best position to mobilize money into the arts, galvanize business leaders in Hollywood and beyond, and raise the visibility of the city’s cultural scene. “He’s got the kind of sex appeal that Hollywood wants,” Mr. McCarthy said. “He could bring these guys together,” in a way that the previous mayor, James K. Hahn, could not.

In 2004 Mr. Hahn floated the idea of doing away with the city’s cultural affairs department altogether. That effort was fought by Mr. Villaraigosa, then a councilman, earning him the support of many grass-roots arts organizations, which helped his 2005 election campaign. “I think we can get Hollywood to be more active in the arts,” Mr. Villaraigosa said. “One of the reasons why we’re focused on finding a visionary leader in the area of the arts is because it’s going to take someone who’s got the wherewithal, the respect, the ethos if you will, in the arts community and can rally that community in support of new initiatives,” like cultural programs in the schools and greater citywide spending on the arts.

If anyone knows how hard it can be to attract that support, it is Mr. Broad, who seems to have a hand in almost everything that goes on in the arts. He was the founding chairman of the Museum of Contemporary Art, and its present location on Grand Avenue downtown, near Disney Hall, is a direct result of his efforts. Mr. Broad is also a trustee of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which is currently building the Broad Contemporary Art Museum on its campus on Wilshire Boulevard, thanks to a $60 million gift from Mr. Broad and his wife, Edythe.

The Broads have also made a big impact on the art schools in the Los Angeles area. Last fall U.C.L.A. opened the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Center, a collection of studios, classrooms, offices and gallery space designed by the architects Richard Meier and Michael Palladino. Outside sits a Richard Serra sculpture commissioned by Mr. Broad for that purpose. And the Broads have donated money for buildings at the two other major art schools in the region, the California Institute of the Arts, known as CalArts, in Valencia, and Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif.

His efforts extend beyond the visual arts. He recently provided a gift to pay for the Los Angeles Opera’s staging of Wagner’s “Ring,” the first time the complete cycle will be produced here.

“Eli Broad really does seem to be the most strategic thinker right now about L.A. and the arts,” said Elizabeth Ondaatje, a Rand Corporation researcher who is directing the institution’s studies of the arts with Mr. McCarthy. “Every other month you read another investment they’ve decided to make.”

Mr. Broad (whose name rhymes with road) has generated a fair amount of resentment in some corners here for his outsized presence on the art scene. His devotion to the downtown projects have been criticized as ignoring pockets of the city that have less access to the arts, like the largely Hispanic sections of East Los Angeles and the areas south of downtown that have large African-American populations. And some of the resistance he faced in his most recent fund-raising effort came from people who wondered why a billionaire was asking for money from taxpayers to promote museums on whose boards he sits.

Ever an optimist, Mr. Broad dismisses those criticisms, saying he prefers to discuss why, despite the relative lack of major corporations here, he still believes that new money can flow to the art world. As evidence, he cited a $25 million donation announced this month by BP, the energy company, to the Los Angeles County Museum to finance a new entrance pavilion.

If it has been hard to attract investment and government support for cultural activities, the city’s vibrant visual arts scene might be seen as its own best advertisement. “The rest of the world is promoting the city as well or better than L.A. does,” said Gary Garrels, the chief curator at the Hammer Museum, who moved here two years ago from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “All of the curators and galleries that are dynamic are coming to Los Angeles and looking at what’s going on here.”

Downtown, which not too long ago was little more than a ghost town after 5 p.m. on weekdays, now bustles with activity around Fifth and Spring streets on Friday and Saturday nights, when art galleries typically schedule their openings of new shows. Similar scenes unfold around more established galleries on Wilshire Boulevard and among emerging contemporary galleries in Santa Monica and Culver City, the incorporated area south of Interstate 10.


Visitors at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.

Last year Los Angeles and its artists were the focus of a major show at the Pompidou Center in Paris, “Los Angeles 1955-1985: The Birth of an Art Capital.” This month the Hammer Museum here will feature 15 contemporary Los Angeles artists in a show exploring what it means to create here, playfully titled “Eden’s Edge.”

As a career art seems more realistic to graduate art students than ever before, said Patrick Painter, who owns a gallery in Santa Monica. “Students graduate here with a feeling they can live in L.A. and make a living in LA.,” he said. “L.A. will never be more important than New York, but it will be equal.”

And naturally some artists adopt Los Angeles precisely because it is not New York. Max Jansons, a Los Angeles painter who is a New York native, graduated from U.C.L.A., then returned to Columbia University for a master’s degree. He now lives in Santa Monica. “I like having time to be in my studio without being surrounded by tons of different voices and seeing all these different shows and being part of that activity,” Mr. Jansons said. “There’s something very focused about your time here in the studio that I never really had in New York when I was there.”

Whereas New York presents more opportunities for the chance meetings with other artists that stimulate discussion, he added, it is easier to isolate oneself and get work done in Los Angeles. “Here you really have to make an effort to be part of something,” he said.

In large part that is because of the sprawl that so defines Los Angeles, said Michael Brand, who came here in 2005 as director of the Getty Museum. “The thing the city lacks is public transport and ease of access,” he said. “That, I think, is a major problem, unlike London, unlike New York, where you can just quickly go to other sorts of cultural organizations. It means people like myself and my colleagues in the end find it harder to maintain a face-to-face dialogue. You’ve got to plan ahead, and at a minimum it’s an afternoon.”

What Angelenos get in the trade of course is physical space. Sherin Guirguis, an artist who was born in Egypt and received her master’s degree from the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, said she chose Los Angeles by necessity. “I couldn’t afford to live in New York no matter what, not even in Brooklyn,” she said. “I’m able to have space here. I make very large work, and it’s very expensive to make.”

Meanwhile the path forged by Mr. Baldessari and others has brought a legitimacy to artists here, one that many people believe will be followed by increasing levels of financial aid. “L.A. has been the model for another American city having a spot in the art world,” said Fredric Snitzer, the owner of a gallery in Miami who brought works by several of his artists to the “Art LA” show here in late January. “In the old days California artists were like they were on another planet,” he said. “In the last 20 years that has changed. There are fabulous artists here who have to be reckoned with.”

[bobcat]

There are just so many major cultural developments under way right now it's amazing. For large scale building projects there's the LACMA, Autry Museum, and CA Science Center expansions, the AMPAS film museum, Children's Museum, and the Colburn School and Coop Himmelblau HS for the performing arts. Hopefully the Natural History expansion will move forward soon as well. In the performing arts there's the booming LA Opera and the revival of LA Ballet, and future performance venues including Nokia Theatre, Variety Arts Center, Gansevoort Theater, as well as the historic theaters along Broadway among others. Not to mention the hundreds of art galleries springing up around the region. And then there's the Chinese Garden at the Huntington, the Ray Charles Museum, the Plaza de Cultura y Artes in Olvera St...

It's really just a matter of time, IMO, till LA starts to attract the large numbers of cultural tourists as perceptions always lag reality by a decade or more.