COMMENTARY : is L.A. a World -class Art City : Pondering the question that become a cliche. L.A. has matured, but there’s still a ways to go

The claim gets made with almost metronomic regularity, but is it true? Is Los Angeles really “a world-class city” for art?

Let’s put the short answer this way: As long as there’s an irresistible need to assert that it is, it probably isn’t. Naked boosterism is fine for the Chamber of Commerce and elected officials, whose honest duty it is enthusiastically to champion the people who keep them in business. But it’s deadly for culture, which gets inadvertently trampled under the cheerleaders’ stomping feet.

The long answer is--well, longer, more complex. Art of a caliber equal to that produced anywhere is certainly made here, and has been at least since 1911, the year Edward Weston set up his photography studio in Glendale. But that doesn’t mean the cultural life of the city has long been distinguished.

The phrase “world-class city,” which came into vogue in the push toward the 1984 Olympic Games, is sound-bite shorthand for cosmopolitanism--a rather more intimidating term. And cosmopolitan is indeed what Los Angeles is in the feverish throes of becoming. Today, the city is straddled between worldliness and its numbing inverse, the deep-seated provincialism that long ago made it the Official National Joke in matters cultural. For art, the dilemma couldn’t be more important.

SQUARE FOOTAGE HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH STATURE.

Cosmopolitanism, or worldliness, is an elusive subject. Because it’s essentially an inclination or a mental attitude, a way of thinking and behaving, it resists by-the-numbers calculation. That’s why the people who incessantly tabulate and tout the square footage--the endlessly subdividing County Museum of Art, the two-venue Museum of Contemporary Art, the overstuffed Norton Simon Museum, the gigantic (and unbuilt) J. Paul Getty Center, assorted private foundations--as the surest sign of world-class stature are hopeless. Pridefully pointing fingers at the burgeoning number of museums is, in fact, a sign of lingering provincial insecurity.

Museums are certainly consequential. As social spaces in which the prospect of sensual gratification is condensed, they’re great places in which to have private epiphanies in public. (Museums gained a reputation for being great pick-up spots because they reek of this intoxicating atmosphere.) Art’s identities are always changing, and those identities don’t take shape in isolation. Museums, as culture’s clubhouses, can bring a variety of social and artistic forces together as a focal point.

When regarded chiefly as emblems of civic accomplishment and distinction, however, this socially interactive, clubhouse function gets narcissistically transformed: The museum becomes a private looking glass in which we unsociably admire our own beneficent reflection.

To identify with your city by identifying with its real estate is a common, even wildly popular, pastime. The national paradigm is currently Donald Trump, whose galloping career has been built by shamelessly exploiting the vulgar power of precisely this anti-social juvenility. He wants you to be seduced, out there along Wilshire Boulevard, by the prospect of seeing your ego reflected in the world’s tallest building.

Vanity is not the problem. (Who isn’t, in some small way, vain?) The source of the pride is.

In a cosmopolitan milieu, acutely observed points of comparison get made more vigorously about works of art than about the relative grandeur of the civic emblems that house them. At the 1984 opening of the much-beloved Temporary Contemporary, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s satellite in Little Tokyo, grandiosity was in short supply. The unvarnished simplicity of the place was of the utmost significance.

Anonymously built as a hardware company’s warehouse a half-century ago, and left nominally raw as square footage when refurbished for museum use, this modest building suddenly set the skewed relationship between art and clubhouse into proper perspective. That’s why the place is beloved. In an era of furious, high-profile clubhouse building both here and abroad, the museum quietly went against the grain. Radiating a startlingly cosmopolitan aura, the achievement made MOCA an international sensation virtually overnight.

After decades of repeated design-debacles at the building of new culture clubs elsewhere in town, the Temporary Contemporary also had gone against the grain of local history. Tradition was eloquently upended, setting into motion a thoroughly galvanic cycle of provincial-into-cosmopolitan awareness. The earlier hiring of Arata Isozaki as architect for MOCA’s principal home, then being constructed from scratch on a vacant lot on Grand Avenue, could finally be cast as a decision of great significance. New architecture is routinely claimed as a building art, and in the making of art the quality of the artist is always central. But those pious cliches, suddenly injected with life, could now be taken seriously.

The emergent cycle was capped with the joyful hiring last year of Frank O. Gehry as architect for the new Disney Concert Hall, the fourth theater for the Los Angeles Music Center, just up the block from MOCA’s home. The old provincial debate for such glamour-projects had been: Which local or non-local architect is right for the job? In successive stages, it had been replaced by: Which architect is right for the job, including those whose practice is based in Los Angeles?

The distinction between the old debate and the new one seems small, but such meticulous refinements are in fact decisive. (God is in the details, as Mies van der Rohe taught us.) Incautiously used, adjectival terms like local art, or even Los Angeles and California art, can be ruinous. The reason is plain: Great art is placeless.

I don’t mean art isn’t deeply rooted in the locality in which it gets made, or that its contours aren’t profoundly shaped by a thousand critical nuances of context. Neither do I mean that art is universal, as if the very idea of art as a kind of visual Esperanto wasn’t itself the product of a highly specific moment in the modern, industrialized West. What I mean is that art opens up experience, and it’s onerous to try to put art or experience in its place.

Gehry intuitively understands this cosmopolitan sense of placeless-ness. Gehry, whose own work is especially indebted to cues taken from works of art, had overseen the refurbishing of the Temporary Contemporary. His canny decision to pretty much leave the warehouse alone, architecturally, created a dazzling kind of “negative space”--an architectural no-place, in which the roaming pleasures of aesthetic experience were vivified.

In the process, Gehry did manage to put dramatically in its place the former status of the culture club. Hardly a peremptory civic emblem, his nuts-and-bolts building declared itself not to be the end of the laborious effort called a museum. The building was just the beginning.

MIKE KELLEY IS THE FIRST L.A. ARTIST WHOSE DEVELOPING REPUTATION COINCIDES WITH HIS ART’S DEVELOPING MATURITY.

One way to measure the condition of the art scene in Los Angeles is to see whether or not it’s an active participant in art’s currently vigorous, newly international conversations. That means identifying whether or not artists who choose to live and work here can develop important reputations beyond the outskirts of town.

Now there’s evidence that some artists can. John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman and Edward Ruscha all were making first-rate art in the robust 1980s, a fact that has not gone unnoticed internationally. But all three had initially stirred interest during the first rush of L.A.’s prominence as an art scene 20 years ago--and none was able to secure that initial reputation for at least a decade or more.

Likewise the sculptor Chris Burden, whose subsequent emergence as a performance artist in the 1970s was as spectacular as it was short-lived. Only now is Burden receiving the kind of high-profile attention commensurate to the importance of his work.

The “arrival,” internationally, of all four by the late 1980s is today being followed closely by that of artist Mike Kelley. But the path of Kelley’s emergent career in the last 10 years has been starkly different from any of his predecessors: Almost immediate admiration in Los Angeles has led steadily to enthusiastic interest in both New York and Europe.

Kelley is 36. Baldessari, Ruscha, Nauman and Burden range in age from 43 to 58. The generational difference is notable. Kelley is the first artist working in Los Angeles whose developing reputation--locally, nationally, internationally--is fully coincident with the developing maturity and resonance of his extraordinary art.

At the risk of getting buried beneath a pile of demographic flow charts that would devolve into comic monologue, this is a clear sign of a newly cosmopolitan character at work in this city. It is not, however, the signal for a testimonial dinner with self-congratulations offered all around. After all, we are talking about the reputation of a single artist, and of an only slightly larger number of artists who are linked by a single gender and ethnicity.

Opportunities have opened for a variety of artists in a variety of places because the internationalism that characterized the art scene of the 1980s has wrecked the possibility of total dominion being held by a powerfully monolithic center. Today, an artist doesn’t get to be an active player in the international discourse without participation in the art scenes of New York and Europe, whose pull is strong. An artist does, however, get to be an active player without Los Angeles, whose influence remains weak.

BEING A MAJOR COLLECTOR OR DEALER HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH BEING AN INFORMED PLAYER.

In this youthfully cosmopolitan city, too few individuals are seizing the day. And I don’t mean the artists.

Major collectors of contemporary art--major being a distinction I make according to volume of passionately informed activity in the international art scene, not according to volume of dumb money spent--play a number of important cultural roles. One serious one is noticeably lacking here. Major collectors don’t yet seem to know the clout they wield, or perhaps how to wield it, in helping to establish important new artists. Not a single one played a significant part in the wider appreciation of Mike Kelley’s art.

Critical and institutional champions of Kelley’s work steadily presented themselves throughout the 1980s, as did a few collectors who were influential locally. In general, though, and except for isolated works by the artist, major collectors in Los Angeles have felt more secure consuming art by established names.

Which is to say, names being established elsewhere.

For collectors, establishing new artists translates into the commitment of aggressively informed acquisition--a decidedly nerve-wracking thing to do. After all, when you’re out there in a relatively unpopulated field, dense with thorny underbrush, and are relying on your eyes, your ears, your charms and your wits to get by, the prospect for doom is immense. And given the newly international stakes, you’ll be called on to vigorously defend your unheard-of position.

Vigorously arguing unheard-of positions is the national sport in cosmopolitan culture. I’m a wee bit biased in this regard, because I’m speaking of an area dear to my heart. But art criticism takes a variety of forms, and assembling a collection can be among the most persuasive.

So, of course, can writing. But writing plainly suffers as an avenue for informed, contentious argument when there’s virtually no place to publish. This absence, widely noted, is commonly followed by claims of the dearth of critics locally, as if criticism could become a venerable, far-flung practice when there is no place in which to publish--no place, that is, except venues whose editors reside on the other side of the country and whose agendas are their own.

The actual problem lies elsewhere: Pathetically few art dealers in Los Angeles pay the matter the slightest attention. Major dealers of contemporary art--major being a distinction I make according to volume of passionately informed activity in the international art scene, not according to volume of dumb money made--play a number of important roles in a cosmopolitan milieu, including as supporters of critical debate. That’s done principally through indirect channels, by way of the advertising that gets art magazines published. Therein lies a tale.

Last year, a disaster waiting to happen called Artcoast magazine blew into town, trailing lots of razzle-dazzle. But the screamingly awful name--I imagined a phalanx of blissed-out subscribers drooling, “Let’s go Artcoasting,” as they set out on skateboards for the Santa Monica gallery crawl--was a dead giveaway of gruesome things to come. (The moniker had been chosen by the magazine’s publisher, a lapsed Madison Avenue marketing whiz.) The publication proudly positioned itself as a journal of, by and for the culture of the Pacific Rim--which is to say, a navel-gazing promotional journal of, by, and for provincial culture. It sank like a stone, disappearing into the abyss after issue No. 2.

Also last year, a small journal financed on a shoestring and called Art issues. began publishing literate, sometimes quirky, frequently insightful criticism. The punctuation in the magazine’s title slyly transforms it into a declarative, two-word sentence--Art issues period. This knowing gesture is miles apart from the blithering nothingness of Artcoast, with its local pitch. All 10 issues have been worth reading. Still, woefully few galleries regularly advertise.

Gallery ads aren’t in magazines to bring customers in the door or to “buy” reviews. Their function is to assist in creating a dense atmosphere of importance around the discussion of art, and then to place the gallery and its artists in proximity to that momentous debate. Symbiosis between commercial galleries and disinterested criticism is crucial, but prospects for worldly engagement are dimmed when a big chunk of the equation is missing.

Artcoast was emphatically promotional in style and substance. Art issues. emphatically isn’t. That the former folded fast while the latter struggles on is at least encouraging. For art, it might signal a crack in the boosterish, public relations mentality endemic to Los Angeles.

BOOSTERISM, THE ENEMY. ART NEEDS NO JUSTIFICATION, DEFENSE OR SUPERVISION.

Demolishing that mentality is essential because boosterism is provincial. Boosterism is about justifying the value of a place-- your place--by encouraging identification with your city, your state, your country. Being “true to your school” means reciting a pledge of cultural allegiance, the taking of a loyalty oath with which to justify your worthiness to belong. Adolescent in temperament, the association gets made in order to hold at bay an inchoate horror at the dawning prospect of finding yourself out there, all alone, in a grown-up world utterly indifferent to your existence.

Dysfunction is inevitable in a climate tyrannized by effusive self-promotion and mawkish public relations because adolescence is prolonged. Los Angeles, glistening oasis that public relations built from little more than semi-arid desert scrub, suffers special burdens in this regard. Relentless promotion is a way of life, as habitual as breathing and bolstered by historic tradition.

By contrast, the intricate pleasures of cosmopolitan culture are calibrated by the sharp resonances of aesthetic experience, which is always anarchistic and destabilizing. (That’s why conservatives hate art so, and why the art world’s typically ascribed profile is liberal.) The great and wondrous paradox of cosmopolitan culture is that civilization gets generated by the willingness, even eagerness, to engage the stresses and strains of aesthetic anarchy--of art that goes against the grain.

As surely as in politically repressive regimes, refinements of aesthetic experience get dulled in an atmosphere dense with cultural boosterism, where blunt enforcement of the law of the land is paramount. Gleeful aesthetic anarchy isn’t wildly compatible with thickly bureaucratic demands.

In our era of woozy national drift, the problem is compounded. America’s favorite pastime (after baseball) is to periodically flirt with the strangling embrace of the loyalty oath. If you doubt it, think of assorted instrumental issues preoccupying the strained energies of the day, from gross claims that the Pledge of Allegiance and flag-burning are topics pivotal to our pressing national debate, to shameful campaigns against free speech in programs supported by the National Endowment for the Arts. Sentimental illusions and the fears they conceal repeatedly divert us.

Finally, art needs no justification, no defense, no supervision in loco parentis . What art needs is sly challenge, discerning argument, delirious intercourse. It needs a light touch too. When we talk of art, we are not talking of healing the sick, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked. We are not talking of moral obligations, but of gratuitous activity. Americans, thanks to the storied tenacity of their Puritan heritage, have always had trouble with art because it doesn’t come to them “the old-fashioned way.” You don’t earn the right to receive the gifts that art is prepared to give. You accept the offer, or you don’t.

Either way is fine. But if you choose to engage art’s ongoing conversations, you certainly have to pay close attention amid the deafening racket of competing voices. Cosmopolitanism is characterized by a constant refusal to be bound by established habits or ingrained prejudices, old or new. By definition, it’s open to perpetual flux.

THE NEW PLAYERS. DON’T BE INTIMIDATED WHEN YOU HEAR ‘MULTICULTURAL’-IT’S AN OLD IDEA WRAPPED IN A NEW LABEL.

Today, multicultural is the new buzzword being most vigorously pushed to replace world class as boosterish civic emblem. As an adjective for art it doesn’t really mean much. As an adjective for Los Angeles, though, it speaks volumes. Multicultural speaks of a dawning consciousness of the untapped power available in a culture whose origins and offshoots both are international. It speaks of the urge toward cosmopolitanism.

As a term, multicultural art is as windy and supererogatory as cosmopolitan art. That it’s a new coinage likely has to do with subconscious recognition of old failures in old cosmopolitan centers, and with an up-front desire to acknowledge today’s abundance of new constituencies--principally Asian and Central and South American--that often were remote from European linkages of the past.

As Americans, we have from the very start defined ourselves not simply according to who we are (or think we are), but according to who we are not . This is probably to be expected of a nation of immigrants. No matter how much fealty to assorted heritages we truly feel, immigrants (and especially their grown children) are people who are not about to undergo the unnerving traumas of relocation to an alien land simply to let themselves be identified as exactly who had been left behind.

The specific identity of “Who we are not “ has typically been multiple and fluid, with different bogeymen assuming the spotlight at different moments in history. America’s postwar engines have been driven by the incantatory declaration: We are not Commies. Today, as an end to the Cold War is declared, winding down the protracted postwar era, the “who” that we have for so long not been has evaporated like a mirage. Anchorless, America’s negative identity flails in wild and woolly flux.

Who are we not going to be now? Externally, the Japanese are, for all the obvious reasons, the leading candidates for jingoist denial. At home, the candidacy is held by a familiar litany of beleaguered, second-class citizens--blacks, Latinos, women, gay people, Jews--as the steadily rising tide of hate crimes eloquently attests.

In its artistic life, Los Angeles has long vigorously identified itself according to who it is not: L.A. is not New York. (Drat! I swore I’d get through this without ever mentioning Them.) Lots of things distinguish the two places. None is more important than this: Unlike urban New York, which took a 19th-Century European and industrial model to unprecedented heights, Los Angeles is a powerful, suburban metropolis constructed as 20th-Century America’s mass culture model. As such, it is the central symbol for a paradox unique to our time.

The city of colossal dreams and endless promises that’s always in the ascendant, Los Angeles is also notorious for never quite being able to make it over the top, for repeatedly failing to make the grade. The Sisyphean paradox is this: Wretched failure is perversely essential to mass culture’s whopping triumphs. Desire is the fuel that turns the engines of consumption, and relentless disappointment is what generates perpetual desire. Mass culture demands its quota of degradation, in order to flourish and to prosper.

To degrade is to de-differentiate, to generalize, to break down and make less specific. Degradation is the antithesis of refinement, and refinements of experience are the province and the pleasure of art. The tensions inherent in this paradoxical phenomenon, and the spiritual, moral, emotional toll it takes, has been the great subject of Mike Kelley’s disturbing and deeply moving art. It shows us who we are. That his art claims inescapable resonance nationally and internationally is an indication of its trenchant worldliness.

The claim “L.A. is not New York” is true--but, whether said with pride or derision, repeatedly declaring the obvious certainly makes for dull conversation. More important, the fact that it’s said at all seems darkly masochistic. For whatever else it is, New York is a prominent aberration in American culture at large: Its artistic life has unremittingly courted the difficult pleasures of aesthetic anarchy. If Los Angeles is not yet New York in the eagerness with which it courts this cosmopolitan attitude, those worldly stresses and strains are nonetheless all around. They’re just waiting to be engaged.