ART : COMMENTARY : ...

Money is not the problem.

Let’s repeat that one more time, even before getting started, just so there’s no confusion: Money is not the problem.

Yes, the art world in Los Angeles has been as economically battered as any other in recent years and, yes, an end to recessionary trauma will certainly be sweet. However, to pin the source of our cultural headaches on fiscal woes is to pretend that, back in the booming 1980s, everything in the art world was A-OK.

In reality, money has more of a tendency to become a problem when there is a lot of it around, as there was then, because money whips up a luxurious distraction from the matter at hand. And the matter at hand is art.

If, in the ‘80s, we were easily distracted by the proliferation of money in the art world, now, in the ‘90s, we’re often distracted by its relative scarcity. The problem, we must acknowledge, is what it always is: The problem is us. How can we organize our social life together in such a way as to responsibly fertilize the field in which art can grow?

Artists do their bit. They make the stuff. How well do we do ours?

Lately, only so-so. A large and ever-growing number of the most significant and compelling artists working anywhere in the world is today based in Los Angeles. Yet, the art world in Los Angeles seems momentarily stuck, thrown off balance by economic slow-down and by social stresses of the past few years.

The wobble is manifest most plainly at the level of museums, because museums are the most visible bridge between the circumscribed world of art and the generalized society. For art, museums hold the promise of transforming an audience into a public. They can be pivotal institutions in the production of social ideas.

There are significant differences between an audience and a public. The art audience and the art public both go to museums. Some of both go to galleries and a few follow critical debates. Some even buy art. But, they’re not the same.

An art audience is passive, an art public is actively engaged. An audience seeks entertainment and diversion, a public wants to participate in the production of cultural meaning. An audience is fickle, prepared to move on to the next passing fancy; a public is committed.

The existence of a gregarious art audience is essential to a healthy art world. It’s the pool from which an art public issues forth. (An art public, by the way, is always self-selected. The conscious decision to become actively engaged does the trick.) The bigger the art audience the better, because the greater the chances for a lively and contentious art public to emerge.

The art audience in Los Angeles has grown by leaps and bounds in the past 25 years and the art public has, too. Still, there isn’t an easy feeling that the art public has quite yet reached critical mass. One sign of critical mass is when, whatever the economic vicissitudes of the day, no one doubts art will come through the other side unscathed and intact.

Today, the courage of artistic conviction seems to be in rather short supply--everywhere, that is, except among artists themselves. More and more of

them just keep getting better and

better. But among galleries, among private and public collectors and in relevant agencies of local government, art is not often enough the single-minded focus of attention.

Remembering McLaughlin

If you doubt it, here’s just one example that continues to astonish year after year: No public institution in Los Angeles, nor any private collector in the vicinity, has yet had the vision to assemble a comprehensive, substantive collection of the first, major, postwar Modern artist to have emerged in Southern California.

John McLaughlin was born at the end of the last century, in 1898. He died 17 years ago, at the age of 78. He left a considerable body of work, which varies in quality and condition, but which incontestably adds up to a superlative achievement. And at this moment, there is no place you can go anywhere in the world--including Los Angeles--to see a full, representative display of the development of his extraordinary art.

The County Museum of Art does have four paintings. The Lannan Foundation has three and the Museum of Contemporary Art has two. McLaughlin is sporadically represented in a number of local private collections. But that’s not much.

The deficiency is not even a mere matter of numbers; it’s a matter of perceived density, or weight. There’s no feeling of McLaughlin’s artistic presence as a crucial historical figure, anywhere at all.

What would it take? Not money. For the price of a smallish new painting by Roy Lichtenstein, which many a local private collector is willing to consider, a sketch of McLaughlin’s entire career could be assembled; for the price of two, a complete overview would be in place.

The limited scope of McLaughlin’s artistic reputation is less a function of the rarefied quality of the geometric abstractions he painted than it is a lingering sign of a self-defeating failure of conviction within the L.A. art world. McLaughlin’s reputation is not large; it’s more cultish and specific. Embarking on the task wouldn’t generate easy adulation for one’s collecting instinct. (If it did, he’d already have been priced at the stratospheric end of the market.) What a labor like that takes is courage of artistic conviction.

There’s a growing coterie of significant art collectors in the city, collectors whose holdings stack up against those of colleagues anywhere. But too few seem confident with their own stature--that is, with their ability to take the leadership in artistic taste, rather than to follow it.

There are collectors here with the clout to virtually establish an artist’s initial reputation. They can drop the stone in the pond that can spread outward to cause an international ripple. Why does it almost never happen? Not because of any shortage of available artistic talent.

The Slow Dance of Bureaucrats

An art scene is a complex ecology. Artists and their work stand at its center, the sun around which the solar system of collectors, dealers, museums, foundations, critics and every other element of the art world should revolve. Sometimes, however, those planets spin wildly out of orbit.

Take the city. Even the occasional civic effort on behalf of the arts typically seems to put art itself at the bottom of the agenda. Instead, hard politics wrapped in muzzy pronouncements of therapeutic social uplift take precedence.

Exhibit A is the widely heralded grant program of the Los Angeles Endowment for the Arts, which has been a flop. Established by the City Council in 1988 and operated by the city’s Cultural Affairs Department, the program annually runs on a mere fraction of the tens of millions of dollars its political architects initially touted as likely revenue for the plan. Still, the $2 million to $3 million in grants to artists and organizations that have been annually awarded could make a substantial difference to the cultural life of the city--if only the program kept art as its focus.

The endowment suffers from the usual dark comedy that afflicts much city bureaucracy. (My favorite joke: Two years can elapse between filing a successful grant application and actually receiving funds. Two years! ) It’s not so funny, though, when the very agency charged with nurturing the civic climate for the arts has little demonstrated faith in the intrinsic value of art itself.

As conceived, the L.A. Endowment for the Arts is instead a social program which attempts to take up some of the slack in dwindling city services. Despite Cultural Affairs Department rhetoric to the contrary, individual grants are not awarded to sustain the work of gifted artists, even though this is the most productive and enlightened form of civic patronage for the arts.

Instead, artist-applicants are required to concoct “community arts programs” in conjunction with schools, hospitals, youth groups or other such agencies. They are further charged with explaining how said project demonstrates a direct social benefit to a non-arts audience. The overarching nuttiness is that artists are not expected to do their own work, which is to make art.

This maladroit program could simply be ignored, if only its effects were benign. (Artists will continue to make art, regardless of civic indifference or financial hardship.) Unfortunately, the scheme is actively counterproductive.

How? Because art with a therapeutic agenda of direct social benefit is but one kind of art--a perfectly legitimate kind, to be sure, but just one kind nonetheless. Through the Endowment, however, the city has effectively declared that no other form of art is worthy of public nurturance.

The irony in this homogenized, one-size-fits-all scheme is that the Endowment was established precisely to foster diversity in the civic art sphere, which had traditionally been monolithic. (To paraphrase the voluminous 1990 L.A. Cultural Master Plan, it had been white and Westside.) Instead of fostering actual diversity, however, the Endowment’s grant program is merely about diversity.

Here’s a gross indicator of what’s wrong. One grant application given raves by a peer-review panel for its exceptionally high level of artistic quality was nonetheless rejected for financing. Why? In the stunning words of a panelist, the project was finally deemed “too specific to an intellectual constituency.”

Huh? Too specific? Isn’t diversity all about celebrating the wondrous specificity of all kinds of different constituencies?

Shouldn’t all endowment programs be aiming for the most specific engagement possible, with as many different constituencies as possible?

Set aside for a moment the shudder of good ol’ fashioned, all-American anti-intellectualism plainly lurking in the panelist’s absurd rationalization. The vilification of specificity is crucial, especially for art. Art’s power and beauty get ratcheted up a notch with every increase in the specificity of its address.

Think of any great work of art, from any culture. Velazquez’s “Las Meninas.” A scroll by Tung Ch’i Ch’ang. Diego Rivera’s murals in Mexico City’s National Palace. A Yombe nail fetish. For each of them, the breadth and depth of its artistic reach is paradoxically a function of its acute specificity. The more vague, generalized and desperate to appeal to an undifferentiated mass a work of art is, the less worthwhile it is.

For resonant artistic diversity in Los Angeles, there is simply no such thing as being too specific--to any constituency. What has been wrong with the traditional art sphere in L.A. is not that it has been white and Westside. What has been wrong is that it has been effectively monolithic-- only white and Westside. And that’s what’s wrong with the Los Angeles Endowment for the Arts, too: One monolithic attitude toward art has merely been replaced with another monolithic attitude toward art. Good-by, diversity.

Prospects for the future are even worse, too, if a proposed reorganization of the Cultural Affairs Department is any indication. Reacting to recession-fueled budget cuts, the department plans to turn over the rest of its scarce resources to the smiley-face monolith of social service programs. Have a nice arts day.

If the Cultural Affairs Department doesn’t have a clue about what it’s up to, the City Council surely does. They’re the overseers of the L.A. Endowment. No one has to tell them about fractured social services in their districts, while politicians can spot a potential source of revenue at a thousand paces on a moonless night. Let’s now register our collective shock that the Endowment has turned out to be less an authentic arts program than a pork barrel for councilmanic districts.

No special genius is needed to see how. Each year the Cultural Affairs Department proudly announces that community arts grants, based principally on merit, have been chosen by independent panels composed of professional artist-peers. The department then proudly announces that these “merit” grants are almost equally distributed among the 15 districts of L.A.

What a miraculous place the City of the Angels must be to have its noteworthy artistic talents annually divided with geometric precision among its politically drawn districts!

As it stands, it’s appalling that the art available for general public funding is restricted by city government to a single kind. That the Cultural Affairs Department gets away with this charade, year after year, indicates a failure of the art public to productively engage the civic life of Los Angeles.

Art, Like Charity, Begins at Home

Culturally engaging the civic life of L.A. is, of course, a pretty tall order. Historically, it has been done from the top down--which is to say, at the level of art institutions. That’s what the growth of museums, foundations and city agencies is about.

But, while institutions are obviously important, counting on institutions to drag us to the Promised Land is always a mistake. Institutions frequently slip into thinking of themselves as the principal providers of culture, but they’re not; individual artists are. A truly meaningful engagement, one that merits being described as an authentically lively cultural life, can only occur from the bottom up.

Artists know that. It’s how they make art. Plenty of good news will be found down there at the bottom of the food chain, as the plethora of first-rate artists in Southern California attests.

It will also be found in certain of the art world structures that spring up around artists. At least two notable developments have lately taken place. One has to do with art galleries, another with art critics. The two are intertwined.

Overall, the huge expansion of the gallery scene in the 1980s, followed by its painful contraction in the recessionary ‘90s, has yielded a considerable net gain over the tiny gallery network that previously prevailed in L.A. From this respiration in the marketplace, two salubrious offspring were born.

One of them is art criticism. (Pardon my prejudice.) At any given moment before the ‘80s, you could have counted on one hand the number of interesting writers on art in L.A., and still have fingers left over. Today, they’ll be found at all levels of proficiency.

There’s no mystery as to how the change occurred: A person becomes an art critic only by writing art criticism, and art criticism only gets written if there’s a place to publish it. No venues, no art critics.

In the ‘80s, multiple venues appeared. Art publishing, which is centered in New York, had had no reason to pay much attention to Los Angeles--until, that is, Los Angeles galleries, flush with ‘80s art-boom revenue, began to buy advertising space in some quantity.

Review assignments followed. Someone had to write them. Critics showed up.

Establishing a viable publishing apparatus is no small task, which is why art criticism is the last and most difficult of the necessary ingredients to develop in an art scene. (If you build it, they will come.) A couple of art publications did start up in L.A., too, but most had a tough time, either in maintaining quality, advertising revenue or both.

When the recession hit, and hit hard, something important happened: Local galleries were forced to cut way back on their magazine advertising--but, they chose to cut back more in out-of-town publications than in Art Issues, the one vital magazine left standing in L.A. A subtle shift in thinking had occurred.

True, ad rates locally are considerably lower than in the New York glossies; dealers could save a buck. Still, a growing number have recognized, even if by instinct, an obvious but decisive fact: There’s long-term wisdom to investing in one’s own community. An insightful editorial base located a few thousand miles away reaps very different rewards from those of an insightful editorial base located down the street.

Editorial copy published from within an art scene, and subsequently exported a few thousand miles away, inevitably represents different priorities, understandings and flavors from editorial copy published elsewhere. It gives an art scene a distinct voice, rather than an echo chamber.

The quality of this editorial viewpoint is emphatically not a matter of churning out Chamber of Commerce-style boosterism, which is the provincial poison that killed off several earlier attempts at local magazines. Instead, it’s a matter of confidence in declaring independent critical evaluations, and of knowing that they’ll resonate wherever the magazine travels.

More and more dealers are aware that commercial galleries are important to a scene not only as sellers of art, but as buyers of advertising space, which creates the venues in which diverse critical arguments can flourish. The trick for an art magazine, as always, is to maintain editorial independence from advertisers. If it works, the critical climate for art is immeasurably enhanced.

The other invigorating offspring of the ‘80s has been the emergence of a new kind of gallery--quirky commercial spaces, launched or run by artists themselves. Endeavors such as Food House in Santa Monica, TRI in mid-Wilshire, Bliss in Pasadena, Nomadic Site in, well, various nomadic sites around town, are instructive. Nomadic Site isn’t quite a commercial gallery--but then, the others aren’t quite either, at least not in the traditional sense. Therein lies their significance.

These newer galleries aren’t the same as the network of artist-run alternative spaces that flourished in the 1970s. Those emerged for two principal reasons: As democratically inspired efforts, they tried to find a way around the hidebound, conservative hierarchy of mainstream museums; as nonprofit spaces, they also sought to escape the economically driven pressures of the commercial sphere.

The new versions arose from a desire to reassert a measure of direct artistic control, after the high-rolling boom years that saw dealers and collectors being lavishly celebrated. What remains the same now as in the ‘70s is that artists wanted to empower artists.

This time, however, artists haven’t regarded art institutions as a flawed model to be idealistically perfected, nor have they attempted to flee the marketplace. No doubt recognizing that ‘70s-style alternative spaces ended up as nonprofit farm teams for ‘80s-style commercial galleries, they’ve simply skipped the middleman.

They’ve done it by turning low-budget (or even no-budget) spaces into galleries: Line up a vaguely regular schedule of exhibitions in your apartment’s living room, and live out back. Give shows to your friends. Make a scene--on your own terms.

The artists’ lead has been followed by several younger art dealers, who have set up shop at home. But these spaces, which can show interesting art, don’t have the same allure. You just can’t shake the knowledge that they’re trying to skirt the cost of rent for a “real” gallery.

What has been demonstrated by the events of recent, decidedly volatile art seasons is not anything we didn’t already know. The lingering economic crunch has certainly been a distraction, but we need only remind ourselves of an enduring lesson: Whether for institutions or individuals, always keep your eye squarely on the art-ball. If you do, everything else will assume its proper perspective.