An influx of New York artists, dealers and museum directors is transforming the L.A. art world.
When my plane broke through the Los Angeles smog on an afternoon in early spring, I imagined I had willed the town into existence by nothing more than my arrival. It’s the city’s foundational myth—perpetually born yesterday. I was there to cover an art fair called Paris Photo, which was being held at that most mythic of L.A. landmarks—Paramount Studios—and to report on the city’s art world. If New York had a say in the matter, it was something of an accident of history that there were ever artists in Los Angeles at all. The dealers and collectors were always in New York. And who could force the entertainment industry to care? For decades, the most noteworthy thing about successful Los Angeles artists—aside from a core group—was that they left for the East Coast.
The reality is more complicated. New York changed. Downtown ceased being a squatter’s free-for-all and became an outdoor shopping center. The S&M clubs and taxi garages of Chelsea gave way to galleries stacked on top of one another. Increasingly, the creatively minded transplants who migrated each day to New York from all over the country came with expiration dates. Ten years would go by, if you were lucky, before the inevitable fatigue set in. So many migrants have gone to California as a solution to some problem that it’s become an American trope. But in a town where the front page of the largest daily newspaper reports the unsubstantiated rumor that industry blogger Nikki Finke would be fired from Deadline Hollywood, the arts have quietly carved out a home. New York just got more and more expensive.
“Manhattan is over,” Christopher Knight, longtime art critic for the Los Angeles Times, told me by phone a few weeks after my return to New York. “Kids can’t move there the way they used to. If you’re not gonna be in Manhattan, and you’re going to cross the river, you might as well keep going to California, where at least the weather is nice.”
There have always been artists in Los Angeles, but it was never a place for gallery empires. Douglas Chrismas’s Ace Gallery seemed at one time to aspire to Castelli-like dominance—he was an early champion of Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra—but Mr. Chrismas never developed a stable artist roster, and his business has been plagued by financial difficulties, lawsuits and bankruptcy filings. The beloved Ferus Gallery, which was the first to show Warhol’s soup cans and gave the world Llyn Foulkes, Robert Irwin and Ed Ruscha, among others, closed in 1966 after less than a decade due to lack of funds. New York galleries have failed when trying to shoehorn their way into the culture here. But that’s all changed lately, with the city hosting several mini-empires—Gagosian in Beverly Hills, Regen Projects in Hollywood and, most recently, an outpost of New York dealer Matthew Marks in West Hollywood. For the most part, the dealers have spread out, though walking around Culver City, where a number of galleries have clustered, one sees a glimmer of Chelsea.
“I didn’t name it,” Tim Blum of Blum & Poe said when I visited the Culver City Arts District. “I’m not a fan of it. It’s not something I’m fond of. We are Los Angeles nine double-O three four, as I like to say.”
Blum & Poe did, however, basically establish the district when it opened in 2003. Mr. Blum was giddy about his gallery’s present space, a 21,000-square-foot warehouse that opened in 2009. He’s especially proud of the parking lot. You know someone means business when they have a parking lot, he said.
Mr. Blum described his city’s art scene as “kind of like a 45-year-old in good shape.” He’s glad younger artists are looking to L.A. as an alternative to New York, but “we don’t want to necessarily encourage it. Because we don’t want the same thing to happen here. We go to New York just as regularly as everyone else, and very rarely do I walk away from a stroll through Chelsea thinking—about much of anything. Usually it’s, ‘ugh, gah.’ It’s so routine.”
Significantly, three former New Yorkers are leading L.A.’s major museums: ex-dealer Jeffrey Deitch at MoCA, ex-Dia Foundation director Michael Govan at the L.A. County Museum of Art, and ex-Drawing Center director Annie Philbin at the Hammer. MoCA was near financial ruin before an institution-saving $30 million matching grant from trustee Eli Broad. Mr. Deitch’s hiring was controversial and led to the abrupt departure last summer of chief curator Paul Schimmel, followed by all four of the museum’s artist trustees quitting. The drama culminated last month with the news that Mr. Schimmel will become a partner in Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, the planned L.A. branch of Swiss gallery Hauser & Wirth, which also operates a space in London and last year opened the largest commercial gallery in New York.
The fate of the L.A. art world would now seem to lie, at least in part, with its expanding gallery scene. There’s a general anxiety that as this commercialism expands, Los Angeles could become the global clusterfuck that New York embodies and perpetuates, a town of galleries with the size and temperament of a Walmart franchise. Blum & Poe is already massive. The rumor floating around was that some of the Takashi Murakami pieces on view when I visited were priced at $5 million, and all of them sold.
Culver City is the latest locus of a continuously roving art district with no real center. “If you stay in one place for long enough, it will come back,” the Downtown gallerist Thomas Solomon told me. Galleries have always had to be versatile here—opening up shop in whatever storefront was available, consolidating at one time into Santa Monica’s Bergamot Station and sometimes doing business out of dealers’ homes. Even for Mr. Schimmel, that the infrastructure of the city never allowed the galleries to become very powerful is a good thing.
“The city is the perfect balance of a really creative community and maybe even a little neglect from the usual sources of patronage,” he told me by phone. “Sometimes when you have too much patronage, or patronage of a certain kind, maybe of a commercial kind, it has a way of hijacking the independence of artists. The challenge that national, international or New York galleries have had in L.A. is not unique to those galleries. I’d go so far as to say that it’s not the best place to have a commercial gallery.”
Mr. Schimmel is widely considered to be one of the world’s finest museum curators. His name will be on the door when Hauser & Wirth’s space opens in 2015. Hauser & Wirth has long had an office in L.A., because when it opened in Zurich in 1996, its program was built around artists working there, including Paul McCarthy, Jason Rhoades and Diana Thater. Iwan Wirth, the gallery’s co-founder, speaking from the Art Basel fair in Switzerland, called his planned expansion to L.A. “a homecoming.” It was Mr. Schimmel’s 1992 survey at MoCA, “Helter Skelter,” that widened the perception of what L.A. art means and served as Mr. Wirth’s introduction to a certain style of art that he said is “still the epicenter” of his program. He added that he decided to start a gallery in L.A. not “because we wanted to expand; it was because Paul became available.”
The arrival of one of the art world’s most powerful commercial enterprises—Larry Gagosian, who had an L.A. gallery in the late ’70s and early ’80s and grew up there, reopened there in 1995, before his world dominance—is a signal that, no matter how difficult it is to run a gallery, the entire L.A. art world will only continue to get bigger, literally if not figuratively. Certainly Hauser Wirth & Schimmel will be huge: “I don’t think you can have a small space in Los Angeles,” Mr. Wirth told me before mentioning happily how cheap the rents are. Homegrown galleries are also expanding. David Kordansky, a former CalArts student who runs two conceptually minded galleries off La Cienega, will move into a 15,000-square-foot warehouse on La Brea in the fall of 2014. (It used to be Impact Stunts, a choreography studio run by Jackie Chan). The idea is to strike a balance between this kind of growth and what Mr. Kordansky deems the “fuck that, we’re gonna do what we want” spirit of Los Angeles, to avoid the commercial trappings of New York, where everybody—even the big guns—has to sell a lot of art to pay for prime real estate.
“In L.A., there’s this manifest destiny notion of individuality and freedom,” Mr. Kordansky said. “Even the bigger galleries, the Regen Projects, the Blum & Poes, we’re still not operating by the rules of New York. And it’s not an us against them kind of mentality. There’s just less parameters out here.”
Part of this is because there are still undeveloped areas in Los Angeles, but also because rents are cheaper. It’s a matter of supply and demand—there are fewer people spread out over a larger area of about 470 square miles. New York is governed by finances. You move to New York to have a career. You move to L.A. to live out a fantasy.
“There’s still room to make mistakes,” Mr. Kordansky said. “There’s still room to fuck up. To just be a human, in a sense.”
(Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)
On my second day in Los Angeles, I met with John Baldessari. Along with Ed Ruscha, Mr. Baldessari is the most respected of L.A. artists, but he hates being called that, just like he hates being called a conceptual artist, an attitude that particularly seeps through in his early works, like poorly composed photographs with the word “WRONG” printed neatly beneath them.
Mr. Baldessari is 82 and as tall as some professional basketball players, with chin-length white hair and a big beard. His studio, a cobweb of steel designed by an employee of Frank Gehry, sticks out among the squat bungalows lacing the narrow streets of Venice. He showed me around, speaking in a surfer’s drawl. It was one of those perfectly laid-out examples of California architecture where you could almost feel the room exhale as you entered it. There was a small rock garden, a gym, a room upstairs with a couch where Mr. Baldessari naps (he’s up just after 5 each morning to the read the papers), an enormous Chinese chili pepper that Tom Waits gifted him (along with a sarcastic note promising that one day they’d both be famous), stacks of books and a surprisingly small number of artworks. In a corner, an assistant was silently putting the finishing touches on a painting of the word RISOTTO beneath a silkscreened photograph of a third-world militia.
“It’s a bit fancy for me,” Mr. Baldessari said of the studio. “I just wanted a big box, but you can’t do that here. You have to kind of tart it up.”
He’s most famous for filming himself writing the phrase “I will not make any more boring art” in a notebook, and for cremating all the paintings he made up until 1966. (“I didn’t need them,” he told me.) He sighed when he said everyone outside of L.A. assumes that L.A. artists are “lotus-eaters.” He uses laziness as a trope, but only to prove that he’s secretly smarter than everyone—as in, he won’t be ignored, but he doesn’t need your praise. Unlike a lot of the more obscure artists on the West Coast (people like Kenneth Price and Jason Rhoades, who were criminally delayed in receiving their dues), Mr. Baldessari has been highly aware for decades of how the art world functions as a business and how artists are commodities. (He resigned from MoCA’s board because of Mr. Schimmel’s departure as well as the creative direction the museum was headed in after it announced a planned exhibition on the history of disco.)
“There are certain artists, I guess we know who they are—we talk about guys having trophy wives, they make trophy art,” he said. “At one of the Venice Biennales, at some function, Eli Broad introduced this guy to me, a Russian billionaire. The first thing he said to me is, ‘I own a work of yours that’s the most expensive of any of your work.’ So I’m curious about what that would be—and he didn’t know what it was. So he called his wife over and he said, ‘Can you describe that piece that we have?’ She said, ‘Well it’s in our New York apartment and it’s out in the hall.’ That’s all she could say! It’s not about art. It’s about owning something that’s really expensive.”
“Is it something you can ignore?” I asked him.
“Well, like you ignore cancer,” he said. I chuckled here, but he didn’t. “I mean you can’t ignore it. But you don’t dwell on it.”
L.A. is less provincial now than ever before. (Not that there haven’t been casualties—last year, Mr. Baldessari’s Los Angeles dealer, Margo Leavin, closed her shop after more than 40 years because of the rise of international art fairs and super-galleries) Mr. Baldessari used to tell his students that if they wanted to have a career as an artist, they had to move to New York. It used to be possible to do that without a day job or a trust fund.
“There’s a time for art here that doesn’t exist in New York anymore,” said Sam Falls, who recently relocated to Los Angeles from New York. He’s not the only young artist to do so—Jacob Kassay, David Benjamin Sherry and Matt Sheridan Smith are other recent migrants. “In the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s, you could get space and have a community, but now I think in L.A., that’s becoming more and more of a thing. There’s less of an expectation for commercial success.” Also absent is New York’s “social guilt,” as Mr. Falls put it, that compulsion to be everywhere at once. “You know, it took an hour to get out to see your friend,” he said, “you might as well not just visit the studio for 30 minutes. Stay awhile.”
The molasses flow of traffic, arguably L.A.’s greatest landmark, makes it difficult to gather a critical mass. It was strange being there to cover an art fair, something that by definition requires a herd. L.A. has historically been a bad town for these events—but the inaugural Paris Photo in April was not a bad start. More people attended the opening night than was expected, which was good until everyone attempted to leave and wound up in a three-hour-long wait to retrieve their cars from the valet. But the fair’s location at Paramount fed into the notion of L.A. as a long daydream and forced the entertainment industry to pay attention.
“People make the assumption that because there are creative people who work in the film industry, they’re going to be interested in contemporary art,” Dean Valentine, a collector and the former president of United Paramount Network, told me by phone last week. “Guys like Jeffrey Deitch come in here and think they’re gonna do all this Hollywood stuff and get all these donations, but it just doesn’t work that way. The film business is mostly a business of people who know nothing about anything. You don’t become an actor because you graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton.”
At Paramount, I walked through the studio’s “New York” back lot, where a section of the fair was being held and which housed all the fake apartment façades, subway kiosks and corporate buildings as well as a Safeway-esque storefront. The fair continued inside a set of giant warehouses, where I saw Perry Rubenstein, who closed his Chelsea gallery in 2011 and opened on Highland Avenue. He’s since been preaching the gospel of Los Angeles.
“Artists have left school, and they’ve looked at Bushwick and they’ve looked at Studio City, and they’ve said, ‘I’m moving to Studio City,’” Mr. Rubenstein said. Before he left New York, he said, “I was visiting an artist I was recruiting out here—and I was living well—but I called my wife and said, ‘This guy’s living better than we are and he doesn’t even have a career yet.’ If you left Cal-Arts and you were part of Baldessari’s original group, he told you to leave. He said you must go to New York. They don’t tell you to do that anymore. I think New York has overhyped its intellectualism. I think we’ve convinced ourselves, in order to deal with living there, that it’s the center of the universe. And it’s not.”
A few hours before I had to catch a flight back to New York, I went to visit Henry Taylor, a figurative, sometimes slightly hallucinogenic painter. His studio is in Chinatown, and he leaves the door wide open for anyone to stumble in.
He had just returned from a trip to Cuba. I mentioned my story about artists from New York wanting to move out here. He said he was contemplating getting an RV and traveling around the country for the foreseeable future. I told him I could get used to the constant sunlight and warmth of California. He reminded me that the days get shorter in L.A. during the winter.
A guy who sometimes works as Mr. Taylor’s assistant walked in carrying a guitar and a bottle of painkillers he’d found on the bus. Mr. Taylor knew of a party in Beverly Hills.
Evening arrived suddenly. A feeling of intense melancholy overtook me as we wove through the traffic on Sunset. I’m not sure of the exact source. I think it was homesickness.
mmiller@observer.com