LA CIENEGA AREA

Conceptual art can be as pedantic and self-righteous as a Moliere schoolmaster but Douglas Huebler is an exception.

He consistently wraps serious rumination about art in a skein of witty satire. His latest project is called “Crocodile Tears” and consists of printed text, photographs and paintings hung side by side. Most of these involve a scenario concerning a rich man willing to pay a high price for an original Degas even though the seller, Gregory, appears to be a shady character peddling a hot masterpiece. In the end we discover that Gregory is actually selling fakes cranked out in a loft by several art forgers. The paintings on view are bogus Degas, Van Goghs, Seurats and so forth.

Interpolated photographs are all street shots of people in various ambiguous situations. Each bears the motto, “Represented here is at least one person who. . .” completed with some such cliche as, “never looks back.”

Up front the pictures seem to have little to do with the forgery intrigue until we realize that both are concerned with cliches that govern how situations are perceived. Huebler’s pictures are all open to interpretation until he provides one that is purposefully so outlandish as to set us thinking or at least chuckling about the contradiction. At bottom I think he is preoccupied with questions of authenticity, which he also pursues in vigorously drawn comic strips.

There are limits to the interest of Huebler’s art. At one level he is a sour satirist grousing endlessly about a “phony” art world, at another he is a cracker-barrel philosopher pursuing blue-sky questions about the nature of reality. In between he is a Voltaire-like popularizer of conceptual doctrine, which is no mean trick. (Kuhlenschmidt Simon Gallery, 9000 Melrose Ave., to Jan. 4.)