ART REVIEW : World’s Recession Jitters Evident at ART/LA90

Not surprisingly, the calamitous New York auctions for contemporary art this fall have caused a few jitters at the International Contemporary Art Fair, which is midway into its fifth annual outing at the Los Angeles Convention Center. (The gathering of some 170 galleries from 20 countries continues through Monday).

As it’s a commercial event, geared exclusively to the selling of art, art fair officials have been quick to outline sharp distinctions between the auction market and the gallery market. The point is well taken, although it would be better taken if the gallery market wasn’t feeling a bit of heat too.

Be that as it may, the marketing linchpin that keeps this or any art fair afloat is only of interest indirectly. You don’t judge the importance of architecture by the concrete used in its foundation, or weigh a painting on the merits of its stretcher bars. Besides, the degree of market success or failure by participating galleries is virtually impossible for an outsider to gauge, except in the grossest of terms. For me, the terms go like this: If the fair returns next year things must be relatively OK; if not, not.

Indeed, even though the Convention Center and the Chamber of Commerce place revenues at the top of the art fair heap, the city’s cultural life is truly enhanced by something else entirely. In this regard, ART/LA90 (as the fair is also known) isn’t about sales of paintings and sculptures by dealers from Brussels and Boston, Santa Monica and Seoul. Except secondarily, it isn’t even about the paintings and sculptures that are the actual objects of trade. More than anything, the fair is about the people in the booths--selling, buying, wandering around or venturing out into the rest of town--who have come from Brussels, Boston, Santa Monica and Seoul. For the cultural life of Los Angeles, the art fair is most important as a five-day focal point for The Big Schmooze.

Like mushrooms after a spring rain, subsidiary events crop up all over town to coincide with the art fair, creating assorted excuses to bring together strangers whose passionate point of reference is art. Foundations choose the moment to convene their widely dispersed advisers or to hold symposiums with invited guests. Open houses compete with parties, dinners vie with museum openings. Out-of-towners find their way to artists’ spaces, galleries and museums. Artists meet dealers who meet collectors who meet curators who meet critics who meet artists.

Seeds get planted. Things happen. Because the fair is now a deeply enmeshed component of the city’s cultural life, a review of these extracurricular events sometimes seems more to the point than a commentary on the fair itself.

The overall level of quality of the international galleries that participate, like the significance of the art each chooses to display, is therefore best thought of as bait, luring assorted fish from other cities and other countries to swim in L.A.’s culture pool. A makeshift booth with glaring spotlights may not exactly provide an optimal viewing situation, but the semi-tacky, product-showroom motif that characterizes any fair finally doesn’t matter. (I’d sooner climb down a well to see a great painting than not see it at all.)

So, what of the art and the galleries at the Convention Center this year? I wish they were better. This year’s array is not as substantive as last year’s, and recession seems the hard reason why. Space at an art fair costs money, especially for galleries that must ship art across a continent and/or an ocean to get there. At this uncertain, unstable moment, both politically and economically, several top-flight dealers who have participated in the past opted to stay home.

Of course, I always wish the quality at the art fair was better. Who wouldn’t? Bemusement at what passes for important painting and sculpture in the minds of some purveyors pales quickly when seen in concentration, as is inevitably the case. Still, there’s plenty of reason to go. It takes a while for your eyes (and your nervous system) to adjust, since steady and prolonged winnowing is required in the face of glut. Yet, in the sudden encounter with a small drawing you almost missed amid the throng, or in the vague detection of accumulated trends, persistence pays off.

Herewith, a few random notes of sights seen and thoughts thought at ART/LA90:

* The major gallery motif this year is period furniture--not in what’s for sale, but in gallery reception areas. Period furniture, especially of a 1940s to 1960s vintage, is everywhere to be seen, including at the Linda Cathcart, James Corcoran, Jan Kesner, Ursula Krinzinger and Richard Kuhlenschmidt galleries. Beyond basic showmanship, don’t ask me what it means.

* The most optimistic dealer at the fair is surely San Francisco’s John Berggruen, whose gallery occupies not one but two booths across the aisle from one another. Each is filled with blue chip stock, including paintings and drawings by Frank Stella, Sean Scully, Willem De Kooning and Richard Diebenkorn.

* Each year the work of one or more artists seems to show up in booths all over the place, indicating major movement in that particular market. In recent years, work by John Baldessari, Dan Flavin and Edward Ruscha has been ubiquitous. This time out, you’ll find a lot of sculpture by Britain’s Tony Cragg (subject of a current survey show at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, which is about to begin a national tour) and a lot of photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe (you remember him).

* A very quick, very short list of covetable, lesser works would have to include: a pencil-and-Polaroid study for a video installation by Bruce Nauman (at Angles); side-by-side Suprematist drawings by Kazimir Malevich and Ivan Klyun (Modernism), and a beautiful, if badly damaged, painting of a canoeist by David Park, from the watershed year of 1957 (Natsoulas-Novelozo).

* A stronger European presence is sorely missed. (Well over half the galleries are from the United States.) A spotlight has been placed on a group of younger galleries from Belgium, but the more established dealer from Brussels (and Paris), Isy Brachot, makes the strongest showing. Especially compelling here are a sweet, 1921 collage by Louis Aragon, a 1919 watercolor by Guillaume Apollinaire and several appealing paintings by Magritte.

* James Corcoran Gallery, with a big booth right near the entrance, has opted for tongue-in-chic stylishness, with walls covered in cork and linoleum and, yes, period furniture--in fact, a whole living-room set. The linoleum wall is further papered over with dozens and dozens of small works (Picasso, Ken Price, Baldessari, Sam Francis, Arthur Dove), as if a portable survey collection or an array of stocking stuffers.

* In fact, “art-as-wallpaper” is a prominent display scheme. One that’s 180 degrees from Corcoran’s up-scale demeanor is at Richard/Bennett Gallery, where a marvelous group of more than 185 ink drawings by Raymond Pettibon are push-pinned cheek by jowl to the booth’s exterior walls. (According to a sign scrawled graffiti-style above them, it’s “The Sam Yorty Wing” of the Convention Center-cum-museum.) Pettibon’s voyeuristic and obsessive meditations on life, death, sex and the spirit make for the most arresting exhibition at the fair.

ART/LA90: Los Angeles Convention Center, 1201 S. Figueroa St. (213) 271-3200, to Dec. 10. Open daily, noon to 7 p.m.