The arty circuit

There he was on a recent Saturday night: Keith Walsh, 41, painter. In the crowd at Bergamot Station, he stood out in his green-striped shirt and sunglasses, exuding the air of someone who knows where he’s going.

Hours later in Chinatown, there he was again -- now with some friends he’d bumped into that night during a gallery crawl that covered several parties in a three-hour span.

As Walsh knows, on any given night you can find an art gallery opening somewhere in the city -- a private space open to the public, where anyone can saunter in, look at art, meet friends and have a drink, all without charge. Once you’ve plugged in, it’s an attractive alternative to the bar scene -- more intimate and, ostensibly, less philistine.

And this year, there’s even more to discover, with several new gallery districts around town. Culver City and Gallery Row in downtown recently were added to the map, joining a scene of at least 300 galleries dotted across the L.A. area.

Bill Lasarow, publisher of ArtScene, a guide to galleries and museums in Southern California, estimates there are at least 150 openings every month.

With this many venues, it is possible to drive west to east in a few hours and experience something otherwise quite elusive in Los Angeles: a social scene you can crash at no cost.

Getting into the party is easy. Simply add your name to the gallery mailing list and soon invitations will flood your mailbox, no strings attached. No need for flowers or RSVPs. And you don’t have to be a collector or an expert, either. The truth is that at these events, nobody really wants to talk about the art. It’s scary (after all, who wants to be exposed as the frauds they know themselves to be?). That’s why people cluster in the center of the room, their backs to the work.

But figuring out the unwritten rules of the various gallery scenes can be as involved and treacherous as decoding Matthew Barney artwork.

Talking to the artist? Remember: The work is always sui generis. Never compare an artist to another artist. Even if it’s meant as high praise.

Talking prices? If you were serious about buying, you wouldn’t be here. You’d have come the day before.

Looking for something to eat? Forget it. As starving artists can attest, the cheese tray is a thing of the past.

What you’ll find in terms of the crowd (and its particular social etiquette) depends on where you descend in the megalopolis. Generally, gallery geography mirrors the city’s real estate and socio-demographics: The scene on the Westside is wealthier and more established; Mid-City, the crowd is more serious and the bar stocked with better wine. Farther east, the crowd turns younger, and the wine also. Downtown, prepare for an all-out party and kegs.

And so, in a city where few things are revealed by leisurely exploration (after all, you’re strolling at 35 mph), locating the right party requires a strategy.

“You become a freeway flier,” said Walsh, who had mapped out a route and schedule that began at the Craig Krull Gallery in Santa Monica with a show of photographs by one renowned artist (Jerry McMillan) of another (Ed Ruscha) and ended on Chung King Road in Chinatown, where art school grads showed minimalist sculpture and video installations.

As a snapshot of the city, it was a pretty good one.

The Westside: Lions and taggers

Near the beach, in a Marina del Rey office complex, surfers had climbed out of the ocean and into the courtyard at the Cartelle Gallery, where paper lanterns were strung in a tree and a DJ blasted a Stevie Wonder remix.

Two beautiful, sullen-looking women handed over vodkas and beer to surfers and taggers. Against a railing, a couple embraced in a kiss while some older gallery-goers complained about the volume of the music.

A dispenser inside the gallery offered “art you can afford” -- itself an art piece with a $1,500 price tag. Nearby hung a $60,000 painting by Billy Al Bengston, titled “Y Tu Gato Tambien.”

It was the second opening for the gallery and already word was out that the two owners (recent Art Center graduates) knew how to throw a party, one quite apart from the button-down wine-sipping at Bergamot Station.

Gajin Fujita, a former tagger and one of the artists in the show, “Deuce,” chatted with a couple in the crowd, both -- like many this night -- wearing flip-flops.

Pronouncing the scene “beach,” designer Phillip de Leon surveyed the crowd.

“Art shows always draw a funky crowd,” he said. “People dress differently for an art show; they’re breaking boundaries.”

As if on cue, man walked by wearing a woman’s hat.

“I rarely go running around in a bandana and a cowboy hat, but I could tonight, and I like that,” De Leon said, referring to his own accessories.

Although crashing an art show might seem intimidating, he recommended it as a dating scene.

“For someone who’s single and looking, it’s a way of meeting people are politically and aesthetically kindred.”

As the party got underway, an older contingent peeled off. Art heir Richard Weisman made a pit stop before heading out for dinner.

The scuttlebutt among the remaining guests: Two paintings had been sold. In the back room, Samuel Freeman, the 29-year-old gallery owner, wearing a gray leather shirt and studs in his ear, was beaming. At Trader Joe’s earlier that day, he’d worried as he maxed out his credit card to buy vodka for the event. With the sale of the paintings, he announced, “the party is now paid for!”

Culver City: The Euro scene

In a corner of Culver City, Susanne Vielmetter, a petite red-haired art dealer wearing square glasses and a white suit, put on her best hostess manners and welcomed guests to her new gallery.

As the early evening light filtered through the windows of the midmodern building, a contingent of European artists mingled with their American counterparts. Against the raw concrete floors and the dazzling white walls, the work (monochromatic paintings, paper constructions) seemed, as first blush, as intimidating as the crowd. But soon, everyone was chatting in the middle of the gallery.

Indeed, it seemed everyone knew one another.

One of the artists in the show, Jane South, a New York-based Brit, was surprised to hear a familiar voice and accent. Rob Moon, a college friend she hadn’t seen for 20 years, had wandered in; they were now exchanging numbers and observations. What ever happened to vodka at gallery openings, South wondered.

In one room, Stephen Heer had unobstructed view of a large Styrofoam sculpture suspended from the ceiling. Another guest walked by and complimented him on the work. “It’s not mine,” he protested good-naturedly. A photographer, he had toured several galleries the previous night and was on the crawl again.

“A lot of times, I go to a friend’s show to meet friends,” he said. “The friends are much more important than the art.”

On a back patio, several Germans were smoking as others helped themselves to Mexican beer from an ice-filled container.

There was not a cracker in sight.

“There’s no cheese anymore. That ended when the market crashed,” Heer said.

As at any party, the conversation this night was about other parties. Where to go next.

“The Hammer? Is that on tonight?” Heer asked, referring to an opening at the UCLA Hammer Museum. “That’s the best spread. They serve all the good stuff, Sierra Nevada,” he said, wistfully referring to the pale ale. “They do it right,” he said, adding as an afterthought: “And they show good art, too.”

Mid-City: Josh shopped here

Jack Rutberg Fine Arts on La Brea Avenue promised -- in addition to free wine -- “provocative works that put the viewer into intimate contact with the dense interior landscapes of both people and places.”

A Land Rover pulled up to the gallery where, in the back, painter Jerome Witkin, in an eggnog-colored suit and pink-striped tie, cordially greeted Josh Groban, the 23-year-old “popera” star whose singing and romantic curly locks have catapulted him to the top of the Billboard pop chart. Rutberg beamed. Celebrity in attendance!

Just two miles from 6150 Wilshire -- a premier complex of galleries showing cutting-edge artists -- Rutberg on La Brea was showing Witkin’s work (likened in a press release to “Manet, Ingres, Goya and Courbet”) and drawing a very different crowd.

In front of a 36-foot Holocaust painting, replete with a depiction of Adolf Hitler in a poison green palette, an older woman complimented another on having lost weight and on a fashionable scarf. Another gallery-goer pronounced the work “grotesque.”

Soft gray carpets and muted light gave the people’s movement and conversations a hushed quality. “Yes, interesting work,” a woman told a man in a suit.

Benicia Gantner, a 33-year-old artist, pondered gallery banter. “People get intimidated when the conversation turns to art,” she said “You can go around and around if something’s good. Its hard to find your footing when you’re basically walking on water.”

And besides, she added, “nobody let them in on the guide book, the rule book.”

Her own show was scheduled to open in a few weeks. Her dual concerns: “hostess syndrome and performance anxiety.”

Downtown: Banjos at the apocalypse

A little farther east, a lot less anxiety: Performance artist Christian Ristow was hosting an opening party in the downtown Brewery Arts Colony space where he works and lives. Dismembered mannequins hung suspended from the ceiling above strange-looking robots and Vargas pinups. A crowd wandered in and among all of it, getting an intimate glimpse of the artist and his work and, if they wanted, his medicine cabinet.

Ristow, who has worked with the San Francisco-based robot performance group Survival Research Laboratories, describes his work as a “provocative mix of post-apocalyptic mayhem and playful iconoclasm,” and that could be said about the scene on this night, too.

Outside, a man played banjo in front of a heap of TV monitors displaying an endless and disjointed loop of silent film noir. About 100 people milled about, carrying drinks from the cash bar.

“A little more underground than a lot of things I’ve seen at the Brewery,” said producer Gregg Cundiff, describing the crowd as embracing “an aesthetic of an anti-aesthetic.”

“They pull from comic books, bubble gums and cartoons. [They are the] urban primitives, the S&M; crew, all these sort of subculture groups -- people who are into radical piercing, tribal tattoos, bones in the nose, all that stuff.”

In short: “an interesting bunch of people,” he said, but added: “much more a social gathering than a gathering about the art.”

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Deconstructing the scene

Westside

(Galleries sprinkled around Santa Monica and Venice and at Bergamot Station)

Who’s there: Champagne socialists

What they’re wearing: More safe than sex, and straight off Montana Avenue -- flat shoes, expensive sweaters, arty scarves. Same for the men.

The pour: Sweet Chardonnay and plenty of it.

The art: The least intimidating galleries to drop into. Work spans the popular spectrum, from kitschy functional to abstract.

Chatting them up: Stay noncommittal (“Interesting ... “). Or talk “process” (“How do you think they did that?”)

Sightings: Michael Caine, Jacqueline Bisset, Robert Graham.

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WeHo

(Melrose Avenue gallery row, west of the Pacific Design Center)

Who’s there: Interior decorators and your in-laws

What they’re wearing: L.A. Eyeworks glasses and lots

of slouchy bags, worthy of a weekend “antiquing”

The pour: The wine is still bad, but the servers are nice.

The art: California plein-air and decorative; with a couple of exceptions, these are places to shop for something nice to hang over the couch.

Chatting them up: Brush up on the latest Architectural Digest cover story; declare it “fabulous.”

Sightings: The design elite -- Thomas Beeton, David Desmond, etc.

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Culver City

(The cluster of galleries at Washington and La Cienega boulevards)

Who’s there: Architects and young Europeans

What they’re wearing: Think Jil Sander -- minimalist and monochromatic, tight and timeless.

The pour: The wine improves, and the beer is trendy -- but you’ll have to serve yourself.

The art: Cutting edge, the up and coming from L.A. and Europe.

Chatting them up: “Did you see the Edward Hopper show at Tate Modern?” “When are you off to Berlin?”

Sightings: Julie Delphy

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Mid-City

(In and around the complex of galleries at 6150 Wilshire)

Who’s there: Curators and collectors

What they’re wearing: It gets funkier and sexier -- skirts and high heels for the women, square toes and tousled hair for the men. Jil Sander works here too.

The pour: The best in the city -- you can’t serve the Lucques crowd two-buck Chuck.

The art: Serious and hot. Don’t go with a grand in your pocket and expect to be able to afford anything.

Chatting them up: Here you might actually talk about the art. Or the latest exhibit at the Hammer.

Sightings: Dean Valentine

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Downtown

(Galleries on Chung King Road in Chinatown and the Brewery Arts Colony)

Who’s there: Art students, their musician friends, designers

What they’re wearing: Funky. Poor students find it secondhand. Rich students don couture.

The pour: Kegger!

The art: This is where you might actually make a discovery -- or just get a bead on the graduating class at CalArts.

Chatting them up: Very self-conscious. Think late-night dorm room meets Art Forum.

Sightings: Jason Lee; Ed Ruscha’s son, Eddie.

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Party primers

Getting on the guest list is usually a matter of wandering into a gallery and signing up for the mailing list. But there are also several websites that will introduce you to the scene:

https://artscenecal.com: Carries a calendar of upcoming openings.

www.picklebird.com: An alternative art magazine with event listings and trade secrets.

www.zerodegreesart.com: Message board and snapshots from openings.

https://art.blogging.la: Blogs, lists and reviews.