artquake : The Epicenter Is Clearly the Arena of Fine Visual Arts

The jolly green mover in the sky scrunched his colossal crowbar into the L.A. River basin and wedged the town one huge notch closer to civilization--in whatever direction that may lie. The confluence of events hereabouts during the last weeks has been astonishing.

Wham, the County Museum of Art opens its long longed wing for modern and contemporary art. Except for a rather pushy street facade, the building works handily, the collection is highly respectable and the inaugural exhibition, “The Spiritual in Art,” is a landmark of curatorial intelligence.

Bam, the Museum of Contemporary Art steps out of a bandbox on Bunker Hill and it is a beauty--exotic, witty and wise. The debut exhibition, “Individuals,” is so grandiose it fails to make sense, so the magnificent scale of the effort takes over and becomes the theme. Contemporary art shows itself as a kind of Baroque “Aida” with real elephants and camels.

Fwap, a great ostrich of an international art trade fair nests into the Convention Center bringing a world sampling of some 130 dealers together here for the first time. They cart in massive amounts of art. At a glance a bazaar-style presentation makes everything look like an amateur art-fest. Turns out to be a hurly-burly of good work staggering from Monet to Haring.

Blik, all the bustle causes observers to notice that while nobody was looking, La Brea Avenue congealed into the beginnings of a new gallery row interspersed with smart restaurants and wacky shops. A really vigorous walker could connect it to Melrose--the Punk Rodeo Drive--and pronounce it A Scene.

Whoops, another may be afoot at the beach. James Corcoran moved his gallery to Santa Monica where it joined the old families Tortue, L.A. Louver, Karl Bornstein and others. Then, with apparent malice aforethought, three more new showplaces jumped out of the cake. The HoffmanBorman, Pence and BlumHelman galleries added themselves to a clump which--although scarcely an art hive--marks a significant shift and growth in local demographics. Those interested in symbolism attached significance to the return of Irving Blum, the stylish dealer who ran the legendary Ferus Gallery which helped launch the whole snowball here back in the ‘60s before he moved to New York.

As activity mounted to intoxication, the electronic Pony Express rider arrives with a bulletin announcing a setback. A plan to make a private contemporary museum in Beverly Hills had come a cropper. The idea had been to turn the Greystone mansion into a reservations-only showplace for the collection of Frederick Weisman. Beverly Hills decided it did not want a cultural asset and some observers breathed a sign of relief. Somehow the idea of a limited-access museum in posh BH had never seemed the best roost for live-wire contemporary art anyway. Relief turned to smiles when Weisman let it be known he would look for another structure in the L.A. area. A warehouse-conversion at the beach would galvanize that scene nicely.

It all just meant that there is even yet more artistic future in a place that might seem to have reached apogee. Further evidence that there is life after climax wafted in when Italian collector Count Giuseppe Panza di Biumo kissed and made up with MOCA after a wrangle in which the count charged the museum with planning to sell works from a collection it had purchased from him. The antagonists finally agreed to agree.

The circumstance served to recall the fact that Panza still has a collection of 500-plus works of recent large-scale, conceptual and environmental creations heavy on local Light and Space art which has caused Pavlovian salivations among local museum people. Everybody wants at least part of it. So far no combination of forces has managed to muster the piddly $20 million the Count claims is a bargain price for his holdings.

Time was, and recently, when the rehearsal of the above events would have constituted a very lively chronicle for a couple of years in L.A.’s art life. The fact that it all came together over a scant three weeks is sufficient evidence that epochal movement here has been achieved.

The epicenter is clearly the arena of the fine visual arts, but rippling cultural shock waves move out in space and time. It is impossible that this artquake which brought worldwide--and largely positive--attention to the town will not be folded into memories of the movingly successful ’84 Olympics and Olympic Arts Festival. One dwells with a certainty that Lotusland’s image has been irrevocably improved.

Why has it come thus finally to fruition? Bring in an economist, a poet and a politician, and you’ll get three different answers. Here we will offer a response at least as good as the medieval explanation of why fire rises. It rises because it is its nature to go upward.

It all happened because we were finally ready for the chapter on modern and contemporary art to be engraved here in institutional marble.

Consider 1969. Brave souls in Pasadena launched the Pasadena Museum of Modern Art. It was to be the Pacific Coast’s equivalent of The Museum of Modern Art. Alas, it was not to be. The museum instead evolved into the Norton Simon repository of Old Master, blue-chip modern and Asian treasures. Then came the boggling wealth of the J. Paul Getty Museum and its antique classical and Old Master collections. These added themselves to the sensible, slowly building historical collections at LACMA and the Anglo-American riches of the Huntington Gallery and voila we were finally ready.

The Fates weren’t going to let us have contemporary museums until we had sketched in the preceding art historical chapters. Now it is possible for student, scholar, artist and amateur to piece together a decent picture of the evolution of art from original works right in his own backyard. That is a giant step from just one generation back when everybody cut their teeth on ancient glass-mounted slides and gray reproductions in dog-eared copies of Helen Gardner’s “Art Through the Ages.”

Not that we have come so far as to long lounge on our laurels. Everybody is allowed to mull among the limp serpentine and broken balloons of celebration until Monday morning, when saturnine realism again wags its bony finger under our noses scolding our lack of this and that.

What is the first priority? Everything, as usual and yesterday. But assuming that the collections keep building and the buildings don’t fall down, what we seem to need most sorely is brains.

Surprised? Everybody always insists that money makes the sphere go round. Well, of course, but this Vesuvian eruption of Post-Mod Baroque institutions proves that money is to be found. Beyond that, what is required is smarts.

Art unsorted is a heap of notions and sensations. An exhibition like LACMA’s “The Spiritual in Art” reminds us that what museums can really best do for us is interpret. Think, for example, how long it has been since anyone undertook to clarify L.A. art. The ‘50s identified Hard Edge Abstraction, the ‘60s the Finish Fetish, the ‘70s Light and Space art. The rest is silence.

There has been a massive proliferation of styles practiced by a ballooning number of artists here and yet no one has undertaken to sort it out. It is time. We have theaters. We have actors. We need plays.